
QPICS'°i™i* 3 MME'i 




^EPRESENTATIYE Eli 

*jP ' Questions oftheTDat 



I 



J 



H i st a c a i St u o i e$ 



■ 



Bra 

ll 



Q uestions qfJ^elie - 




Questions QrB£Li&F% 



S35 



NTERNATt0 



tiAL Issues |$j 





of Representative Essays on Questions of the Day 



Edited by TITUS MUNSON COAN. 



Published in handsomely printed i6mo volumes, which will be issued 
- monthly. Price each, in paper, 25 cts., in cloth, flexible, 60 cents. 

JSStSt received in advance for twelve numbers> in paper * at $2 - s ° ; 

The Essays will be arranged in such divisions as the following, to each of 

which successive volumes will be devoted : 

Social Problems, Studies in Biography, 
Historical Studies, International Issues 
Questions of Belief, Studies in Literature, 
Scientific Progress. 

The series is designed to bring together, for the convenience of readers 
and for permanent preservation, the results of the best thought of the best 
writers of the day, principally selected from the leading English and Conti. 
nental journals. 

It is characteristic of recent thought and science that a much larger pro 
portion than ever before of their most important work appears in the form 
of contributions to reviews and magazines, the thinkers of our time submit- 
ting their results at once to the great public. 

As a consequence, there are subjects of the deepest present and perma- 
nent interest, almost all of the literatures of which exist only in the shape of 
detached papers, individually so famous that their topics and opinions are in 
everybody s mouth, yet collectively only accessible for re-reading and com- 
parison to those who are painstaking enough to search long files of periodi- 

C ft. I 5 ■ 

The grouping of topics by volumes is the distinguishing feature of the 
present series, and in so collecting these separate papers as to give the 
reader a comprehensive view of the discussions of which they form a part 
and in enabling them to b S preserved as a part of the history of modern 
thought, it is believed that the series will render a service that will bewidelv 
appreciated. 1 



TOPICS OF THE TIME. 

The editor proposes to make the Topics of the Time substantially a 
continuance of the excellent series entitled "Current Discussion," which 
was edited by Mr. Burlingame, but the present volumes will have the ad- 
vantage of being more compact in size and much lower in price. 

As well for the permanent value of their contents as for the neatness and 
attractiveness of their form, the publishers believe that they will meet the 
wants of many readers, 

Volume I, SOCIAL PROBLEMS, was issued in May. 

Volume II, BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES, was issued in June. 

Volume III, STUDIES IN LITERATURE, was issued in July. 

Volume IV, HISTORICAL STUDIES, was issued in August, and 
comprises ; 

1. Village Life in Norfolk 600 Years Ago. By the Rev. Dr, 

Augustus Jessopp, The Nineteenth Century. 

2. Siena. By Samuel James Cappar. The Contemporary Review. 

3. A Few Words about the Eighteenth Century. By Frederic 
Harrison. The Nineteenth Century. 

4. France and England in 1793. By Oscar Browning. The Fort- 
nightly Review. 

5. General Chanzy. Temple Bar. 

Volume V, QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, was issued in September. 
Volume VI, ART AND LITERATURE, will appear in October, 
and will contain : 

1. The Philosophy of the Beautiful. By Prof. John Stuart Blackie, 
Contemporary Review. 

2. South Kensington Hellenism : a Dialogue. By H. D. Traill. 
Fortnightly Review. 

3. The Beginning of Art, By Stanley Lane-Poole. Fortnightly 
Review. 

4. The Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Stage. Edinburgh 

Review. 

5. The Impressionists. By Frederick Wedmore. Fortnightly 
Review. 

6. Wagner and Wagnerism. By Edmund Gurney. Nineteenth 
Century. 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, Publishers, 

27 & 29 WEST 23D STREET, NEW YORK J 
25 HENRIETTA ST., COVENT GARDEN, LONDON. 



Glass "fe'R 5 
Book ,G *5 7 

PRESENTED BY 



Number 8 September, 1883 

Topics of the Time 



Questions of Belief 



EDITED BY 

TITUS MUNSON COAN 



NEW YORK 
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

27 & 29 WEST 23D STREET 

1883 



.Gsl 



Press of 
G. P. Putnam's Sons 
New York 

P. 

MR. HUTCHESON, 



S Afc'OJ 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. By 
Vernon Lee, The Contemporary Review [May, 
1883] : ... . . . . . i 

AGNOSTIC MORALITY. By Frances Power 

Cobbe. The Contemporary Review [June] . .57 

NATURAL RELIGION. By Edmund Gurney. 

Mind [April] . . 82 

THE SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 
By Leslie Stephen. The Nineteenth Century 
[March and April, 1883] . . . . . .129 

MODERN MIRACLES. By E. S. Shuckburgh. 

The Nineteenth Century [January] .... 194 



Questions of Belief. 



THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF UN- 
BELIEF: 

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN THREE RATIONALISTS. 
By VERNON LEE. 

"And finally/' asked Vere, "what do you 
think is likely to have been the result of Mon- 
signore's wonderful sermon > n 

He had gone to meet his two friends in the 
late summer afternoon ; and as they walked 
slowly toward the old farm on the brink of the 
common, they had been giving him an account 
of the sermon which they had just been to hear ; 
a sermon probably intended to overcome the 
last scruples of one Protestant in particular, a 
lady on a visit to the neighboring Catholic Earl, 
but ostensibly delivered for the benefit of Prot- 
estants in general— that is to say, of as many 
country folk and stray visitors as could be col- 
lected in the chapel of Rother Castle. 

u The result," answered Rheinhardt with that 
indefinable cosmopolitan accent, neither French 
nor German, which completed the sort of eigh- 
teenth-century, citizen-of-the-world character of 



2 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



the great archaeologist ; " the result/' answered 
Rheinhardt, " is that Baldwin and I have spent 
a most delightful and instructive afternoon, and 
that you would have done so too, Vere, had you 
not scornfully decided that no Catholicism more 
recent than that of St. Theresa deserved the 
attention of the real aesthetic pessimist." 

Vere laughed. " What I want to know is, 
whether you suppose that Monsignore has suc- 
ceeded in making another convert ? " 

" I think he must have succeeded," answered 
Baldwin ; " he had evidently brought that soul 
to the very brink of the ditch which separates 
Protestantism from Catholicism ; his object was 
to make the passage quite insensible, to fill up 
the ditch so that its presence could not be per- 
ceived. He tried to make it appear to Protes- 
tant listeners that Catholicism was not at all 
the sort of foreign, illiberal, frog-eating, Guy 
Fawkesy bugbear of their fancy ; but, on the 
contrary, the simple, obvious, liberal, modern, 
eminently English form of belief which they 
think they have got (but in their hearts must 
have felt that they have not) in Protestantism. 
And I really never saw any thing more ingen- 
ious than the way in which, without ever men- 
tioning the words Catholicism or Protestantism, 
Monsignore contrived to leave the impression 
that a really sincere Protestant is already more 
than half a Catholic. I assure you that, if it 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 3 



had not been for the awful sixpenny chromo- 
lithographs of the Passion, the bleeding wooden 
Christs, the Madonnas in muslin frocks and 
spangles, and all the pious tawdriness which 
makes Rother Chapel look like some awful Bel- 
gian or Bavarian church, I might almost have 
believed, for the moment, that the lady in ques- 
tion would do very wisely to turn Catholic. " 

"I wonder whether she will?'' mused Vere, 
as they walked slowly across the yielding turf 
of the common, which seemed, in its yellow 
greenness, to be saturated with the gleams of 
sunshine, breaking ever and anon through the 
film of white cloud against which stood out the 
dark and massive outline of the pine clumps, 
the ghostlike array of the larches, and the oale- 
blue undulation of the distant downs. 

" She may or she may not," answered Rhein- 
hardt ; " that is no concern of mine, any more 
than what becomes of the actors after an amus- 
ing comedy. . What is it to us unbelievers 
whether one more mediocrity be lost by Prot- 
estantism and gained by Catholicism ? ' T is 
merely the juggler's apple being transferred 
from the right hand to the left ; we may amuse 
ourselves watching it dancing up and down, and 
from side to side, and wondering where it will 
reappear next ; that 5 s all." 

Vere was fully accustomed, after their three 
weeks' solitude together, correcting proofs and 



4 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 

composing lectures in this south-country farm, 
to Rheinhardt's optimistic Voltairean levity, his 
sheer incapacity of conceiving that religion could 
be a reality to any one, his tendency to regard 
abstract discussion merely as a delightful exer- 
cise for the aristocracy of the intellect, quite 
apart from any effect upon the thoughts or con- 
dition of the less gifted majority. He admired 
and pitied Rheinhardt, and let himself be amused 
by his kindly sceptical narrow-mindedness. 

" Poor woman ! " replied Vere, " it does seem 
a little hard that her soul should be merely an 
apple to be juggled with for the amusement of 
Professor Rheinhardt. But, after all, I agree 
with you that it is of no consequence to us 
whether she turn Catholic or remain Protestant. 
The matter concerns only herself, and all is 
right as long as she settles down in the faith 
best adapted to her individual spiritual wants. 
There ought to be as many different religions 
as there are different sorts of character — relig- 
ions and irreligions, of course ; for I think you, 
Rheinhardt, would have been miserable had you 
lived before the invention of Voltaireanism. The 
happiness of some souls appears to consist in a 
sense of vigor and self-reliance, a power of cen- 
suring one's self and one's neighbors ; and Prot- 
estantism, as austere and Calvinistic and demo- 
cratic as possible, is the right religion for them. 
But there are others whose highest spiritual 



/ 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 5 

bien etre consists in a complete stripping off of 
all personality, a complete letting themselves 
passively be swung up and down by a force 
greater than themselves ; and such people ought, 
I think, to turn Catholic." 

Rheinhardt looked at Vere with a droll ex- 
pression of semi-paternal contempt. " My dear 
Vere/' he asked, " is it possible that you, at 
your age, can still believe in such nonsense? 
Ladies, I admit, may require for their complete 
happiness to abandon their conscience occasion- 
ally into the hands of some saintly person ; but 
do you mean to say that a man in the posses- 
sion of all his faculties, with plenty to do in the 
world, with a library of good books, some intel- 
ligent friends, a good digestion, and a good 
theatre when he has a mind to go there, — do 
you mean to tell me that such a man can ever 
be troubled by the wants of his soul ? " 

" Such a man as that certainly would not," 
answered Vere, " because the name of such a 
man would be Hans Rheinhardt." 

" It is very odd," remarked Baldwin, " that 
neither of you seem to consider that the lady's 
conversion can concern anybody except herself ; 
Rheinhardt looks upon it as a mere piece of 
juggling ; you, Vere, seem to regard it in a kind 
of aesthetic light, as if the woman ought to 
choose a religion upon the same principle upon 
which she would choose a bonnet — namely, to 
get something comfortable and becoming." 



6 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



' Surely/' interrupted Vere, "the individual 
soul may be permitted to seek for peace wher- 
ever there is most chance of finding it." 

" I don't see at all why the individual soul 
should have a right to seek for peace regard- 
less of the interests of society at large, any 
more than why the individual body should 
have a right to satisfy its cravings regard- 
less of the effect on the rest of mankind," re- 
torted Baldwin. " You cry out against this 
latter theory as the height of immorality, be- 
cause it strikes at the root of all respect for 
mine and thine ; but don't you see that your 
assumed right to gratify your soul undermines, 
what is quite as important, all feeling of true 
and false ? The soul is a nobler thing than the 
body, you will answer. But why is it nobler? 
Merely because it has greater powers for good 
and evil, greater duties and responsibilities ; and 
for that very reason it ought to have the less 
right to indulge itself at the expense of what 
belongs not to it, but to mankind. Truth -" 

" Upon my word," put in Rheinhardt, " I 
don't know which is the greater plague, the old- 
fashioned nuisance called a soul, or the new fan- 
gled bore called mankind." And he pushed 
open the gate of the farm-garden, where the 
cats rolled lazily in the neatly gravelled paths, 
and the hens ran cackling among the lettuces 
and the screens of red-flowered beans. When 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. J 



they entered the little farm-parlor with its deep 
chimney recess, curtained with faded chintz, 
and its bright array of geraniums and fuchsias 
on the window-ledge, they found that their 
landlady had prepared their tea, and covered 
the table with all manner of home-baked cakes 
and fruit, jugs of freshly cut roses and sweet 
peas. 

" It is quite extraordinary/' remarked Rhein- 
hardt, as he poured out the tea, " that a man 
of your intelligence, Baldwin, should go on ob- 
stinately supposing that it can matter a jot what 
opinions are held by people to whom opinions 
can never be any thing vital, but are merely so 
many half-understood formulae ; much less that 
it can matter whether such people believe in " 
one kind of myth rather than in another. Of 
course it matters to a man like Monsignore, 
who, quite apart from any material advantage 
which every additional believer brings to the 
Church of which he is a dignitary, is fully per- 
suaded that the probable reward for Protestants 
are brimstone and flames, which his Evangel- 
ical opponents doubtless consider as the special 
lot of Papists. But what advantage is it to us 
if this particular mediocrity of a great lady re- 
fuses to be converted to the belief in a rather 
greater number of unintelligible dogmas ? Sci- 
ence and philosophy can only gain infinitely by 
being limited strictly to the really intelligent 



8 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



classes ; the less all others presume to think, 
the better " 

a Come now," objected Vere, "you are not 
going to tell me that thought is the privilege of 
a class, my dear Rheinhardt." 

" Thought," answered Rheinhardt, " is the 
privilege of those who are capable of thinking." 

" There is thinking and thinking," corrected 
Baldwin ; " every man is neither able nor re- 
quired to think out new truths ; but every man 
is required, at least once in his life, to take some 
decision which depends upon his having at least 
understood some of the truths which have been 
discovered by his betters ; and every man is re- 
quired, and that constantly, to think out indi- 
vidual problems of conduct, for which he will 
be fit just in 'proportion as he is in the habit of 
seeing and striving to see things in their true 
light. The problems which he has before him 
may be trifling, and may require only a trifling 
amount of intellect ; but of such problems con- 
sists the vast bulk of the world's life, and upon 
their correct decision depends much of the 
world's improvement." 

" The world's improvement," answered Rhein- 
hardt, " depends upon every thing being done 
by the person best fitted to do it ; the material 
roads and material machinery being made by 
the men who have the strongest physical mus- 
cles and the best physical eyes, and the intel- 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 9 



lectual roads being cut, and the intellectual 
machinery constructed, by the men who have 
the best intellectual muscle and sight. There- 
fore, with reference to conversions (for I see 
Baldwin can't get over the possible conversion 
of that particular lady), it appears to me that 
the only thing that can possibly concern us in 
them is, that these conversions should not en- 
danger the liberty of thought of those who can 
think ; and this being gained (which it is, thor- 
oughly, nowadays), that they should not inter- 
fere with the limitation of thought to those 
whose it is by rights. That religious belief is 
the best which is most conducive to complete 
intellectual emancipation.'' 

" But that is exactly why I am sorry that 
Monsignore should make any converts," cried 
Baldwin. 

" And for that reason," continued Rheinhardt, 
fixing his eyes on Baldwin with obvious enjoy- 
ment of the paradox, " I think that we ought to 
hope that Monsignore may succeed in convert- 
ing not only this great lady, but as many ladies, 
great and small, as the world contains. I beg, 
therefore, to drink to the success of Monsignore, 
and of all his accomplished, zealous, and fasci- 
nating fellow-workers ! " And Rheinhardt drank 
of his cup of tea with mock solemnity. 

" Paradoxical as usual, our eighteenth-century 
philosopher," laughed Vere, lighting his pipe. 



10 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



" Not paradoxical in the very least, my dear 
Vere. Look around you, and compare the de- 
gree of emancipation of really thinking minds 
in Catholic and in Protestant countries : in the 
first it is complete — confession, celibacy of 
clergy, monasticism, transubstantiation, Papal 
infallibility, Lourdes water, and bits of semi- 
saintly bones in glass jars, as I have seen them 
in Paris convents, being too much for the 
patience of an honest and intelligent man who 
reads his Voltaire and his Renan. With your 
Protestant your case is different, be he German 
or English : the Reformation has got rid of all 
the things which would stink too manifestly in 
his nostrils ; and he is just able to swallow (in an 
intellectual wafer which prevents his tasting it) 
the amount of nonsense the absorption of which 
is rewarded by a decent social position, or per- 
haps by a good living or a professorship ; mean- 
while he may nibble at Darwinism, Positivism, 
materialism, be quite the man of advanced 
thought ; for, even if he be fully persuaded that 
the world was not created in six days, and con- 
sider Buddha and Socrates quite as divine as 
Christ, he will yet allow that the lower classes 
must not be too rudely disturbed in their belief 
of the story of the apple and its fatal conse- 
quences. • And this merely because a parcel of 
men of the sixteenth century, without any 
scientific reasons for doubt and up to the ears 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. II 



in theology, chose to find that certain Romish 
dogmas and practices were intolerable to their 
reason and conscience ; .and therefore invented 
that disastrous modus vivendi with Semitic and 
mediaeval notions which we call Protestantism. 
And then we men of the nineteenth century are 
expected to hold Luther and Calvin centenaries, 
to make fine speeches and write enthusiastic 
passages about them, and cry " Long live relig- 
ious toleration." No, no ; give me the Council 
of Trent, the Bull Unigenitus, Loyola, Lainez, 
and Pascal's Jesuits ; give me Lourdes water 
and silver ex-votos, and slices of the Pope's 
slipper, and Capuchins and Trappistes ; give me 
Monsignore Russell, because in so doing you are 
giving me Voltaire and Diderot, and Michelet 
and Auguste Comte ! " 

" But," put in Vere, "you seem by your own 
account (for you know I don't regard Cathol- 
icism as you do, and I don't think it matters 
what a man believes as long as his belief suffices 
to his soul), to be buying the total emancipation 
of a few minds at the expense of the slavery 
and degradation of an enormous number of men. 
If Catholicism is so bad that no one who has 
the option will compromise with it, have you a 
right to prescribe it to the majority of mankind ? " 

" Progress, my dear Vere, exists only in the 
minority. The majority may receive an im- 
proved position, but it cannot improve itself ; 



12 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



so secure the freedom of the minority before 
thinking of any thing else." 

" That is all very well," answered Baldwin, 
who had been leaning upon the table, eagerly 
following Rheinhardt's words, and watching for 
an opportunity of interrupting him, " that 's all 
very well as long as you go upon the supposi- 
tion that the only thing of value in this world 
is scientific truth, and the only improvement 
which can be wished is the increased destruc- 
tion of error. But there is something more 
valuable than scientific truth, and that is, the 
temper which cannot abet falsehood ; there is 
something which it is more urgent to demolish 
and cart off than mere error, and that is, all the 
bad moral habits, the habit of relying on other 
folks' judgment, the habit of not sifting the evil 
from the good, the habit of letting one's self be 
moved instead of moving one's self, the habit 
of sanctifying low things with high names ; ali 
the habits of spiritual sloth, spiritual sybaritism, 
spiritual irresponsibility. In this is the real 
degradation, the real danger. And Protestant- 
ism, which you call a modus vivendi with false- 
hood, merely because the men of the six- 
teenth century rose up against only as much 
error as they themselves could discern, — Prot- 
estantism meant the refusal to abet falsehood 
and foulness, the effort to disentangle good 
from bad, to replace mysticism by morality ; it 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 1 3 



meant moral and intellectual activity, and com- 
pleteness and manliness. It meant that in the 
sixteenth century ; and, say what you will, it 
means that still nowadays. The men who arose 
against the Papacy in the time of Luther are 
naturally not the men who would still be mere 
Protestants in the days of Comte, and Darwin, 
and Spencer ; as they preceded and dragged on 
their inferiors then, so they would seek to pre- 
cede and drag on their inferiors now ; they 
would be, what they were, pioneers of truth, 
clearers away of error. But those are Protes- 
tants nowadays — that is to say, possess a religion 
expunged of the more irrational notions and 
demoralizing institutions of the Middle Ages, 
a religion less mythological and more ethical — 
but for the Reformation, would still be morally 
starving, and from starvation contracting all the 
loathsome moral diseases and degrading moral 
palsies which we observe in the Catholic fore- 
fathers before Luther, in their Catholic contem- 
poraries of Spain, and Italy, and France. The 
Reformation may have done nothing for the 
thinking minority ; it may even, as Rheinhardt 
insists, have made that minority smaller, but to 
the small minority the Reformation gave a vast 
majority, which is not, as in Catholic countries, 
separated from it by an unbridgeable gulf. The 
number of completely emancipated minds may 
be less in Protestant countries ; ' but behind 



H QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



them is a large number of minds which are yet 
far from being utterly cramped and maimed 
and impotent, which have not gone very far on 
the right road, but have not gone far on the 
wrong one ; minds possessing at least rudimen- 
tary habits of inquiry, of discrimination, of sec- 
ular morality, and which, little by little, may 
be influenced, improved, enfranchised, by those 
who are more fully developed and more com- 
pletely free. This is what Protestantism has 
done for us ; and the highest thing that we can 
do, is to follow in the steps of those first Prot- 
estants, to clear away what appears to be error 
in our eyes, as they cleared away what appeared 
to be error in theirs/' 

" The Reformation/' persisted Rheinhardt 
calmly, " was a piece of intellectual socialism. 
It consisted in dividing truth so that each man 
might have a little scrap of it for himself, and 
in preventing all increase by abolishing all large 
intellectual capital." 

" I have never doubted/' remarked Vere, 
"that the Reformation was, for all the para- 
doxes of this Voltairean of ours, a most neces- 
sary and useful revolution. It swept away — 
and this is what I most regret — the last shreds 
of Pagan purple, the last half-withered flowers 
of Pagan fancy, out of Christianity, and left it 
a whitewashed utilitarian thing — -a Methodist 
chapel, well ventilated and well warmed, but 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 1 5 



singularly like a railway waiting-room or a ware- 
house. But of course such a consideration can 
have no weight. Protestantism (excuse my con- 
fusion of metaphors) maybe called the spiritual 
enfranchisement of the servile classes ; it turned, 
as Baldwin says, a herd of slaves and serfs into 
well-to-do artisans and shopkeepers. I think, 
therefore, that Protestantism was an unmitiga- 
ted blessing for what Rheinhardt calls the intel- 
lectual proletariat, for the people who neither 
increase intellectual wealth nor enjoy intellect- 
ual luxury. There is something as beautiful in 
the rough cleanness of belief of a Scotch or 
Swiss artisan as there, is in a well-scoured deal 
table and a spotless homespun napkin ; and I 
often have felt, talking with certain French, Ital- 
ian, and Austrian peasants, that, spiritually, they 
live in something between a drain and a cellar. 
So that, if I were a great landed proprietor or a 
great manufacturer, or any other sort of modern 
leader of men, I should certainly feel bound to 
put every obstacle in the way of a conversion of 
my tenants and operatives by a man like Monsig- 
nore ; I should feel as if they were going to sell 
their solid and well-drained cottages in order to 
live in mere mud cabins without drains and with- 
out chimneys. But when it comes to the upper 
classes, to those who have a certain secured in- 
tellectual life, the case would be different." 
And Vere puffed away at his pipe, as if he had 
settled the question. 



i6 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



" Really/' cried Baldwin, " I don't see at all 
why you should be indifferent to the aristocracy 
of intellect (as Rheinhardt calls it) living in 
what you describe as a spiritual dwelling par- 
taking of the cellar and of the drain." 

"I am not indifferent," answered Vere, "but 
I see that a certain standard of intellectual and 
moral wealth having now been attained, there 
is not the faintest chance of a man living in a 
cellar or a drain. Given a certain amount of 
intelligence and culture, which one may nearly 
always assume among our educated classes, our 
spiritual dwellings are sure to be quite healthy 
enough ; and I can't see, therefore, why each 
man should not be permitted to build his house 
to please his fancy, and fill it with whatever 
things may give him most pleasure. He is do- 
ing no harm to anybody, and no one has any 
right to interfere with him. Oh, I know you, 
Baldwin ! you would be for forcing your way 
into a man's spiritual house and insisting (with 
a troup of Positivistic policemen and sanitary 
inspectors at your heels) that every room must 
have a given number of cubic feet of air and a 
given number of windows, and that wall-papers 
must be made to wash, flowers be carefully re- 
stricted to the hot-house, and that an equal 
temperature, never rising much above the moral 
and intellectual freezing-point, should be kept 
up. Now, I happen to consider that this visit 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 1 7 



of yours, although most benevolent, would be a 
quite unjustifiable intrusion ; and that you 
would not have the smallest right to tear 
down the curtains of a man who enjoys a 
subdued light, still less to pitch his flowers and 
incense-burners out of his bedroom window. 
Joking apart, I think there is no greater mis- 
take than to interfere with the beliefs of people 
who belong to a class which has secured quite 
enough spiritual freedom ; let them satisfy their 
own nature, and remember that the imaginative 
and emotional wants, the spiritual enjoyments 
of each man, are different from those of his 
neighbor " 

" That is exactly my view," put in Rhein- 
hardt : a let the imbeciles keep out of my way, 
and I certainly won't get into theirs. Let us 
enjoy our own intellectual ambrosia, and leave 
them to their beer and porridge, which they 
think every bit as nice " ; and he threw his 
cigarette into the fire. 

" I understand/' said Baldwin, overlooking 
Rheinhardt's remark, and addressing himself 
directly to Vere, " according to you the class 
w T hich possesses the highest intellectual life has, 
like the governing social body, a right and an 
obligation to interfere in the spiritual mode of 
life of such classes as might, if left to them- 
selves, become a public nuisance." 

" That is rather a hard way of putting it," 



1 8 Q UESTIONS OF BELIEF. 

answered Vere, " but such, in the main, is my 
principle." 

" You wish your lower classes to be Protes- 
tant for the same reason that you would wish 
your lower classes to live in sanitary-regulation 
houses, because a condition of spiritual darkness 
and dirt would produce nasty spiritual diseases, 
which might spread to your upper class, and 
would, at all events, fill the streets with sights 
and smells quite unendurable to your upper class, 
which is of course as aesthetical as it is humane. 
The unfortunate hardworking creatures who save 
us from manual labor must be looked after and 
taught how to be decent, spiritually as well as 
physically, both for their own sake and for ours. 
So far I completely follow your ideas. But I 
confess my inability to follow, in the sense of 
understanding its justifiableness, the rest of 
your theory. From your manner of speaking, 
and your allusion to men building their spiritual 
homes to suit their fancy, and excluding the 
light and scenting the air as they please, I pre- 
sume that in your opinion a man who has in- 
herited the means of living in leisure, un- 
troubled by the necessity of earning his bread 
or of liberating his conscience (his ancestors 
having given their labor and their blood for 
that), need think of nothing beyond making his 
life as agreeable as possible to himself." 

" I wonder, Baldwin, you can be so grotesque 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 1 9 



as to suppose that I am an advocate of any 
thing of the sort," interrupted Vere rather 
angrily. 

"Why not ?" asked Rheinhardt, "'t is the 
height of wisdom ; and for that reason, indeed, 
cannot be your idea, Vere." 

" You are not an advocate of this theory when 
applied by fashionable numskulls, certainly, 
my dear Vere. Of the men who think of noth- 
ing but enjoying themselves by eating dinners 
at a guinea a head, sitting up till six in the 
morning in ballrooms or playing cards at the 
club, driving four-in-hand, and having wives 
dressed out by Worth, and collections of bad 
pictures and apocryphal bric-a-brac ; of such 
men, or rather beings, you have as bad an opin- 
ion as myself. Indeed, I dare say, you have a 
considerably worse one than I have, because I 
am always ready to admit that the poor devils 
whom we revile as the corrupt of the world, are 
in reality acting for the best according to their 
lights, being totally unable to conceive of a 
higher mode of existence or a more glorious 
destiny. But the case changes when, a man's 
leisure consists not merely in his no longer be- 
ing required to earn his bread, but in no longer 
requiring to free his mind from the painful re- 
strictions and necessities of former days ; when 
his inherited w 7 ealth consists not merely in 
estates and cash, but in intellect and knowledge. 



20 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



What are we to think of this new sort of favor- 
ite of fortune, if he employ that intellectual 
leisure and those intellectual riches merely in 
feeding his mind with exotic spiritual dainties 
(among which,, even as with the more material 
epicure, rottenness constitutes a great attrac- 
tion) ; in playing games of chance with his own 
beliefs and emotions ; in bedecking himself and 
attitudinizing in the picturesque rags and tags 
of effete modes of feeling and antiquated modes 
of thought, because he enjoys making himself 
look interesting, and enjoys writing sonnet 
sketches of his poor maimed and crippled soul 
decked out in becoming purple, and gray and 
saffron and sad green of paganism, and asceti- 
cism, and Baudelaireism, and Schopenhauerism ; 
- — what shall we say of the man who does this, 
while nine tenths of his fellow-men are slaving 
at mechanical labor ; who refuses to employ his 
leisure and his powers in doing that other kind 
of work without which mankind cannot exist, 
the work of sowing and grinding the grain 
which must make the spiritual bread of the 
world ? To me it seems as if this man were but 
a subtler and less conscious robber ; keeping in 
barren mortmain, even as the clergy before the 
Revolution kept the fruitful acres of France, 
that which ought to keep and strengthen and 
support a thousand morally starving and 
anaemic wretches/' 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 21 



a What ! " interrupted Rheinhardt, " a man is 
not to enjoy his own intellectual advantages, 
but must consider himself the steward of all the 
imbeciles, proletaires, and paupers of the intel- 
lectual world ! This is Socialism/ my good 
Baldwin, of the rankest and most intolerable 
description ! " 

" It may be Socialism to you, Rheinhardt, 
and it may be a private pet Socialism of my 
own ; but it has nothing to do with what other 
folks call Socialism, which defeats not only its 
own, but still more my own, object. Under- 
stand me rightly — all progress (and I think you 
will have to agree with me), all diminution of 
misery and increase of happiness, is in direct 
proportion to the utilization of the various sorts 
of capital — physical, intellectual, and moral — - 
land, money, muscles, brains, hearts, which we 
possess ; and the more we put our capital to 
profit, the more do we enable the putting to 
profit of such capital as has lain dormant; 
hence progress must increase at a constantly 
greater ratio. For instance, think of all the en- 
ergies of mind and heart and hand which must 
have been wasted in the cast-civilizations and 
in the feudal system ; think of all the precious 
qualities which must be wasted nowadays owing 
to the still imperfect exchange of individuals 
among the various classes of society, which may 
keep a man with a great financial endowment 



22 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



making bad tables and chairs, and a man with 
a genius for carpentering ruining his partners 
with imbecile speculation." 

"That is very true/' remarked Vere; "but/' 
he added, not perhaps without a touch of satis- 
faction in his voice, as if unconsciously pleased 
at any want of connection in Baldwin's ideas, 
" I don't see that these remarks, however inter- 
esting, have much to do with your onslaught 
cn the poor mortals who venture to retain 
doubts and habits and love of old faiths which 
your philosophy happens to condemn. ,, 

" They have every thing to do with each 
other, since one is but the other's logical con- 
sequence. Rheinhardt has just called me a So- 
cialist ; well, I don't think you would get many 
Socialists to agree in my belief that all progress 
depends upon the existence of a class quite 
above all necessity of manual labor and business 
routine; which, while the majority of men are 
keeping the world going by supplying its most 
pressing bodily wants, may separate the true 
from the false, and gradually substitute higher 
aims and enjoyments for lower ones; in short, 
do the work of improvement, if not by actually 
discovering new truth, or even by promulgating 
it, at least by storing it ready for need." 

" All improvement must come from the mi- 
nority," remarked Rheinhardt, "since improve- 
ment means the development of special and 
rare advantages." 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 



23 



" In short," went on Baldwin, " I hope for a 
fair division of labor between the upper and 
lower classes, the one working for the other, 
and neither idle. Of course, this is but a dis- 
tant ideal, itself possible only as the result of 
infinite progress ; still, it is clear that we are 
tending that way. At present the great pro- 
portion of what we call the upper classes are 
quite incapable of any work that could not be 
performed by the lower ; their leisure is, and 
must be, mere idleness. But, as I said just 
now, within the upper classes there is an upper 
class ; the men who can originate, or to least 
appreciate, thought, — the nucleus of my real 
upper class of the future. These have not 
merely leisure, but also the faculties to render 
it profitable ; and their leisure, as I said before, 
means not only that they have been saved the 
trouble of supplying bodily wants, but also, which 
is much more important, that they have been 
saved the trouble of ridding themselves of so 
many erroneous modes , of thought which are 
still heaped up in the path of the inferior 
classes. This is the class of men whom you, 
Vere, say we have no right to interfere with ; 
who, as we may be sure that they won't elect 
to live in cellars and drains, ought to be per- 
mitted to build their spiritual dwellings in ac- 
cordance with their own fancy, and to fill them 
with whatsoever mental and moral bric-a-hrac 



2 4 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



and stage property may give them most pleas- 
ure, turn them into little pleasure palaces of 
the Imitation of Christ, the Positive Philosophy, 
or the Flenrs dn Mai style of spiritual decora- 
tion. With the unfortunate rich numskull, too 
stupid to do intellectual work, too stupid to 
know that there is any to do ; too helpless to 
have responsibilities ; with him I can have 
patience, I can even sympathize. But with this 
other man who has not only leisure and educa- 
tion, but intellect and conscience, I have no 
patience, I have only indignation ; and it is to 
this man that I would say : ' What right have 
you to arrange your spiritual house merely to 
please your fancy or your laziness ? What 
right have you to curtain out the intellectual 
light from eyes which are required to see for 
others as well as for yourself ? What right 
have you to enervate with mystical drugs the 
moral muscle, which must clean out not your 
own conscience merely but the conscience of 
others ? Above all, what right have you to 
bring up in this spiritual dwelling of your fancy, 
in this confusing penumbra, and amid these 
emasculating fumes, those for whose souls you 
are most responsible, your children ; that not 
only your mind and heart but theirs should be 
mere waste and vanity for all the world ? ' " 

Baldwin had gradually grown earnest and 
excited ; and what had been at first an abstract 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 



25 



discussion, became, as the thought burned 
stronger within him, almost a personal attack ; 
in speaking the last words he had risen from his 
chair, and instinctively fixed his eyes on Vere, 
where he sat in the dusk of the twilit room. 

The latter did not look up ; he knocked the 
ashes out of his pipe and remained seated, 
watching the smouldering fire. There was a 
moment's silence, during which the ticking of 
the clock and the cackling of the poultry out- 
side were painfully distinct. 

" If there is a thing I detest," muttered 
Rheinhardt, " it is the militant, humanitarian 
atheist ; no priest ever came up to him for 
spoiling a pleasant chat." He felt that the dis- 
cussion had long ceased to be academic ; and to 
him, who engaged in controversy as a sort of 
aesthetic pleasure, nothing could be more 
utterly distasteful than a discussion taken too 
much in earnest. He suddenly broke the silence 
by exclaiming : 

" Just look what an odd sky." 

The room was by this time getting rapidly 
dark, so that Rheinhardt, who was at bottom 
the most sympathizing of men, could feel 
rather than see the excited face of Baldwin, the 
gentle and melancholy, but slightly ironical, 
just a little pained, expression of Vere. In the 
midst of the duskiness, the window blazed out 
white and luminous, with the sash-bars, the 



26 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



stems and leaves of the flowers, the bushes out- 
side,, the distant firs and larches bounding the 
common sharp and black against a strange 
white light. He stepped into the garden. 

" Do come out," he cried, " and look at this 
preposterous sunset ; it is worthy the attention 
of sesthetical creatures like you, and Vere may 
write a fine splash-dash description of it." 

The two men rose and followed Rheinhardt 
out into the garden, and thence on to the road, 
which wound behind the stables and hayricks 
of the old farm. Before them was a sea of 
gently undulating hillocks, steeped in a broad 
and permeating white light, the mere conscious- 
ness of which, as it were, dazzled and dazed. 
A brilliant light which seems to sink out of the 
landscape all its reds, and yellows, and with them 
all life ; bleaching and yellowing cornfields and 
brown heath ; but burnishing into demoniac ener- 
gy of color the pastures and oak woods, brilliant 
against the dark sky as if filled with green fire. 
Along the roadside the poppies, which an ordi- 
nary sunset makes flame, were quite extin- 
guished, like burnt-out embers; the yellow 
hearts of the daisies were quite lost, merged 
into their shining white petals. And, striking 
against the windows of the old black and white 
checkered farm (a ghastly skeleton in this 
light), it made them not flare, — nay, not redden 
in the faintest degree, but reflect a brilliant 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 2J 



speck of white light. Every thing was unsub- 
stantial, yet not as in a mist ; nay, rather sub- 
stantial, but fiat, as if cut out of paper and 
pasted, on, the black branches and green leaves, 
the livid glaring houses, with roofs of dead, 
scarce perceptible red (as when an iron turning 
white-hot from red-hot in the stithy, grows 
also dull and dim). The various ranges of hills 
projecting beyond each other like side-scenes 
covered with uniform gray ; the mass of trees 
toward the distant downs, bleached white 
against the white sky, smoke-like, without con- 
sistence ; while the fields of green barley and 
ripening wheat trembled, and almost vibrated 
with a white, white-hot light. 

" It looks like the eve of the coming of Anti- 
christ, as described in mediaeval hymns," re- 
marked Vere ; " the sun, before setting never 
more to rise, sucking all life out of the earth, 
leaving it but a mound of livid cinders, barren 
and crumbling, through which the buried na- 
tions will easily break their way when they 
arise. " 

Baldwin had no intention of resuming their 
discussion, but to his surprise, and Rheinhardt's 
annoyance, Vere himself returned to the sub- 
ject of their former conversation. As they 
were slowly walking home, watching the strange 
whiteness turning into the gray of twilight, he 
said, as he passed his arm through Baldwin's : 



28 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



" My dear Baldwin, I see very plainly that 
you think you may have hurt my feelings, and 
that you are sorry for it. But don't worry 
yourself about that, because you have n't really 
done so. I am, excuse my saying so, suffi- 
ciently your elder, not merely in years, I think, 
but in experience of the world, to understand 
perfectly that to you every thing seems very 
simple and obvious in this world, and that 
you have n't found out how difficult it is to 
know right from wrong. It seems to you that 
you have written me down, or rather have com- 
pelled me to. write myself down, a selfish and 
cowardly wretch ; and you are sorry for me 
now that it should have happened ; nay, don't 
try to deny it. But I know very well that I am 
nothing of the sort ; and I can understand your 
position sufficiently to understand why you 
think me so ; and also, considering your point 
of view, to like you all the better for your in- 
dignation. But tell me, has it never struck you, 
whose philosophy consists in checking the 
waste of all the good and useful things in the 
world — has it never occurred to you to ask 
yourself whether you may not, in this instance, 
be wasting, ruthlessly scattering to the four 
winds of heaven, something quite as precious as 
this leisure to think, and this power of thought 
of which you make so much — wasting a certain 
proportion of the little happiness which man- 
kind has got ? " 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 2g 



" I don r t hardly see what you are driving at„ 
Vere," answered Baldwin, pushing open the 
wicket which separated the farm-yard from the 
common. 

" The happiness of mankind — that is to say 7 
of the only part of mankind worth taking into 
account/' put in Rheinhardt, with a malicious 
pleasure in intruding his own jog-trot philosophy 
among what he considered the dreams of his 
two friends — ^ depends upon its being able to dis- 
cuss abstract questions without getting red in 
the face, and telling people that they are 
viler 

" There is some truth in that also/' laughed 
Vere, " but that was not in my mind. What I 
mean is this : has it never occurred to you that 
instead of increasing the happiness of mankind, 
as you intend doing by insisting that every one 
who can should seek for the truth in spiritual 
matters, you would in reality be diminishing- 
that happiness by destroying beliefs or half be- 
liefs, which afford infinite comfort and consola- 
tion and delight to a large number of men and 
women ? " 

" I have never doubted/' answered Baldwin, 
somewhat bitterly, " that it must have been 
very distressing for the French nobles to have 
their domains confiscated in the Revolution, 
and for the poor, elegant, chivalrous planters to 
have their negroes emancipated for them. StilL 



3° 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



such distressing things have to be done occa- 
sionally." 

" You misunderstand me again, ' answered 
Vere, " and you might know better than to 
continue fancying that l am a kind of spiritual 
aesthete, or sybarite. The universe, as religion 
shows it, is not really true with the universe as 
it really exists ; but in many cases it is much 
more beautiful and consoling. What I mean is 
this : since at the bottom of the Pandora's box 
which has been given to mankind, and out of 
which have issued so many cruel truths, there 
exists the faculty of disbelieving in some of 
them, of trusting in good where there is only 
evil, in imagining sympathy where there is 
indifference, and justice where there is injustice, 
of hoping where there is room only to despair 
— since this inestimable faculty of self-delusion 
exists, why not let mankind enjoy it, w T hy wish 
to waste, to rob them of this, their most precious 
birthright ? " 

" Because," answered Baldwin, "increasing 
truth is the law of increasing good ; because if 
we elect to believe that which we wish instead 
of believing that which is, we are deliberately 
degrading our nature, rendering it less excellent 
and useful, instead of more so, than it was ; and 
because by being too cowardly to admit that 
which is, we are incapacitating ourselves, mis- 
leading and weakening others, in the great 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 3 1 



battle to make the kingdom of that which is 
into the kingdom of that which should be." 

" I leave you to fight out your objective 
and subjective worlds," said Rheinhardt, taking 
up a book and settling himself by the lamp. 

Vere was silent for a moment. " Every one," 
he said, " is not called upon to battle in life. 
Many are sent in to whom it might be merely 
a tolerably happy journey. What right have 
we to insist upon telling these things which will 
poison their happiness, and which will not, per- 
haps, make them any the more useful ? You 
were speaking about the education of children, 
and this, which to you is a source of bitterness 
and reproach, has been to me the subject of 
much doubt and indecision. And I have come 
to the conclusion that I have no right to take it 
for granted that my children will necessarily 
be put in such positions as to require their 
knowing the things of which I, alas ! have had 
the bitter certainty ; that should such a position 
be awaiting them, disbelief in all the beautiful 
and consoling fictions of religion will come but 
too soon, and that I have no right to make 
such disbelief come any earlier." 

" In short you deliberately teach your chil- 
dren things in Avhich you disbelieve ?" 

Vere hesitated. "I teach them nothing; 
their mother is a firm believer, and I leave the 
children's religious instruction entirely in her 



32 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



hands. I have never," he added with some 
pride, " made the slightest attempt to under- 
mine my wife's belief ; and shall not act differ- 
ently toward my children." 

Baldwin fixed his eyes searchingly upon Vere. 
" Have you ever really cared much about your 
wife, Vere?" he asked. 

" I married her for love ; and I think that 
even now I care more for her than for any one 
else in the world. Why do you ask ? 

" Because," answered Baldwin, " it is perfectly 
inconceivable to me that, if you really love 
your wife as I should love a wife if I took one, 
not as my mere squaw, or odalisque, or as the 
mother of my children, but, as you say, more 
than any one else in the world, you can endure 
that there should exist a subject, the greatest 
and most solemn in all the world, upo«n which 
you and your wife keep your thoughts and feel- 
ings secret from each other." 

" I have friends, — men with whom I can dis- 
cuss it." 

" And you can bear to be able to open your 
whole soul to a friend, while keeping it closed to 
the person whom you say you love best in the 
world ? You can bear to feel that to your highest 
thoughts and hopes and fears there is a response 
in a man, like me, scarcely more than a stranger 
to you, while there is only blindness and dumb- 
ness in this woman who is constantly by your 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 33 



side, and to whom you are more than the whole 
world ? Do you consider this as complete 
union with another, this deliberate silence and 
indifference, this growing and changing and 
maturing of your own mind, while you see her 
mind cramped and maimed by beliefs which 
you have long cast behind you ? " 

" I love my wife, and I respect her belief." 

" You may abet her belief, Vere, but if, as 
you say, you consider it mere error and false- 
hood, you cannot respect it." 

" I respect my wife's happiness, then, and my 
children's happiness ; and for that reason I re- 
train from laying rough hands upon illusions 
which are part of that happiness. Accident 
nas brought me into contact with what you, 
and I f call truth. I have been shorn of my be- 
lief ; I am emancipated, free, superior — all the 
things which a thorough materialist is in the 
eyes of materialists ; but," and Vere turned 
round upon Baldwin with a look of pity and 
bitterness, " I have not yet attained to the per- 
fection of being a hypocrite, a sophist to myself, 
of daring to pretend to my own soul that this 
belief of ours, this truth, is not bitter and 
abominable, arid and icy to our hearts." 

Rheinhardt looked up from his book with a 
curious expression of wonder. " But, my dear 
friend," he said, very quietly, " why should the 
truth be abominable to you ? A certain num- 



34 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



ber of years employed as honorably and happily 
as possible, and after that, what preceded this 
life of yours ; what more would you wish, and 
what evil is there in thfs that you should shrink 
from teaching it to your children ? I am not 
afraid of death ; why should you be? " 

44 You misunderstand me," answered Vere; 
" Heaven knows I am not afraid of death — nay, 
more than once it has seemed to me that to lie 
down and feel my soul, like my body, grow 
numb and number, till it was chilled out of all 
consciousness, would be the greatest of all joys. 
The horror of the idea of annihilation is, I 
think, to all, save Claudios, the horror, not of 
our own annihilation, but of the annihilation of 
others ; this Schopenhauer overlooked, as you 
do, Rheinhardt, when he comfortably argued 
that after all we should not know whether we 
were being annihilated or not, that as long as 
we ourselves are awake we cannot realize sleep, 
and that we need only say to ourselves, ' Well, 
I shall sleep, be unconscious, never wake/ 
In this there is no horror. But Schopenhauer 
did not understand, having no heart, that 
Death is the one who robs us, who takes away 
the beloved, leaves us with empty arms. The 
worst of death is not the annihilation of our- 
selves ; — oh, no, that is nothing; no, nor even 
the blank numbness of seeing the irremediable 
loss ; — it is the sickening, gasping terror, coming 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF 35 



by sudden unexpected starts, of foreseeing that 
which will inevitably be. Poets have said a 
great deal, especially Leopardi, of Love and 
Death being brothers, of the desire of the one 
coming along with the presence of the other ; 
it may be so. But this much is certain, that 
whatever may be said of the brothership of 
Love and Death, Love, in its larger and nobler 
sense, is the Wizard who has evoked for us the 
fata morgana of an after-life ; it is Love who 
has taught the world, for its happiness, that 
there is not an endless ocean beyond this life, 
an ocean without shores, dark, silent, whose 
waters steam up in black vapors to the black 
heavens, a rolling chaos of disintegrated 
thoughts and feelings, all separated, all isolated., 
heaving up and down in the shapeless eternal 
flood. It is Love who has taught us that what 
has been begun here will not forever be inter- 
rupted, nor what has been ill done forever re- 
main unatoned ; that the affection once kindled 
will never cease, that the sin committed can be 
wiped out, and the good conceived can be 
achieved ; that the seed sown in life will yet 
bloom and fructify in death, that it will not 
have been cast too late upon an evil soil, and 
the blossom of promise will not forever have 
been nipped, the half-ripe fruit not forever have 
fallen from the tree ; that all withijn which is 
good and happy, and forever struggling here, 



36 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



virtue, genius, will be free to act hereafter ; that 
the creatures thrust asunder in the world, vainly 
trying to clasp one another in the crowd forever 
pushing them apart, may unite forever. All 
this is the wonderful phantasmagoria of Love ; 
Love has given it to mankind. What right 
have we to sweep it away ; we " — and Vere 
turned reproachfully toward Baldwin — "who 
have perhaps never loved, and never felt the 
want of such a belief? " 

Baldwin was silent for a moment, then an- 
swered, as he struck a shower of sparks out of 
the dull red embers : 

" I have never actually had such a belief, but 
I have experienced what it is to want it. I 
was brought up without any religious faith, 
with only a few general notions of right and 
wrong; and when I first began to read and to 
think for myself, my ideas naturally moved in a 
rationalistic, nay, a materialistic path, so that 
when in the course of my boyish readings I 
came upon disputes about an after-life, it seemed 
to me quite impossible to conceive that there 
could be one. When I was very young I be- 
came engrossed in artistic and archaeological 
subjects : it seemed to me that the only worthy 
interest in life was the beautiful ; and, in my 
Olympian narrowness of sympathy, people who 
worried themselves about other questions 
seemed to me poor, morbid, mediaeval wretches. 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 37 



You see, I led a life of great solitude, and great 
though narrow happiness, shut up among 
books, and reading only such of them as fav- 
ored my perfect serenity of mind. But little 
by little I got to know other men, and to know 
somewhat more of the world ; then things be- 
gan gradually to change. I began to perceive 
the frightful dissonances in the world, the hor- 
rible false notes, the abominable harmonies of 
good and evil ; and to meet all this I had only 
this kind of negative materialism, which could 
not suffice to give me peace of mind, but which 
entirely precluded my accepting any kind of 
theory of spiritual compensation and ultimate 
justice ; I grew uneasy, 'and then unhappy. 
Just at that moment it so happened that I lost 
a friend of mine to w r hom I was considerably 
attached, whose life had been quite singularly 
unfortunate, indeed appeared to be growing a 
little happier only a few months before his death. 
It was the first time that death came near me 
and close before my eyes. It gave me a fright- 
ful moral shock, not so much perhaps the loss 
of that particular individual to myself as the 
sense of the complete extinction of his person- 
ality, gone like the snuffed-out flame or the 
spent foam of the sea, gone completely, no- 
where, leaving no trace, occupying no other 
place, become the past, the past for which we 
can do nothing. ,, 



38 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



Rheinhardt had put down his book for a 
moment, and listened, with a puzzled and won- 
dering look. That people should be haunted 
by thoughts like these seemed to him almost as 
incomprehensible as that the dead should arise 
and join in a ghastly dance around the grave- 
stones ; nor would this latter phenomenon have 
seemed to him much the more disgusting of 
the two ; so, after a minute, he settled down 
again and pulled out of his pocket a volume of 
Aristophanes. 

"You have felt all this, Baldwin/' said Vere, 
" and you would nevertheless deliberately inflict 
such pain upon others ? You have felt all the 
misery of disbelief in a future life, and you are 
surprised that I should be unwilling to meddle 
with the belief of my wife and children ? " 

" I am surprised at your not being almost in- 
voluntarily forced into communicating what 
you know to be the truth ; surprised that, in 
your mind, there should not be an imperious 
sense that truth must out. Moreover, I think 
that the responsibility of holding back truth 
is always greater than any man can calculate, 
or any man, could he know the full conse- 
quences thereof, could support. We have been 
'speaking of the moral discomfort attendant 
upon a disbelief in a future life ; a moral dis- 
comfort, which, say what we may, is nowadays 
only momentary, does not outlive our first grief 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 39 



at death, for we moderns have not a very vital 
belief in a future state. Well, we ought also to 
think of what was the state of things when such 
a belief thoroughly existed, when what you call 
the phantasmagoria of love was a reality ; — 
bring up to your memory the way in which the 
mystics of the Middle Ages, and, indeed, the 
mystics of all times, have spoken of life — as a 
journey during which the soul must neither 
plow nor sow, but walk on, its eyes fixed upon 
heaven, despising the earth which it left barren 
and bitter as when it came. ' Servate tanquam 
peregrinum et hospitem super terram, ad quern 
nihil spectat de mundo negotiis,' that is what the 
" Imitation " bids us do. Ask yourself which 
is the more conducive to men making the world 
endurable to others and themselves, to men 
weighing their w T ishes and thoughts, and bridling 
their desires, and putting out all their strength 
for good,- — the notion that there is a place 
beyond the grave where all is perfect, where all 
sloth and unkindness, and repeated folly and 
selfishness may be expiated and retrieved ; or 
the notion that whatever excellence there can 
be, man must make with his own hands, that 
whatever good may be done, whatever may be 
felt, repaired, atoned for, must be done, felt, 
repaired, and atoned for in this world. Even 
were I logically convinced of the existence of a 
future life, I should be bound to admit the 



40 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



enervating effect thereof on our sense of re- 
sponsibility and power of action. I should 
regret the terrible moral tonic of the knowledge 
that whatever of good I may do must be done 
at once, whatever of evil I have done, be 
effaced at once also. But let this be, and 
answer me, Vere, — Do you believe that a single 
individual has a right to hide from others that 
which he believes to be the truth ? Do you 
seriously consider that a man is doing right in 
destroying, for the sake of the supposed happi- 
ness of his children, the spark of truth which 
happens to be in his power, and which belongs 
neither to him nor to his children, but to the 
whole world ? Can you assert that it is honest 
on your part, in order to save your children the 
pain of knowing that they will not meet you, 
or their mother, or their dead friends again in 
heaven, to refuse to give them that truth for 
which your ancestors have paid with their blood 
and their liberty, and which your children are 
bound to hand on to their children, in order that 
this little spark of truth may grow into a fire 
which shall warm and light the whole world?" 

" There is something more at stake than the 
mere happiness or unhappiness of my children," 
answered Vere, — -" at all events than such happi- 
ness as they might get from belief in an after- 
life. There is the happiness, the safety of their 
conscience." 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF, 4 1 



" Do you think you can save their conscience 
by sacrificing your own ? " 

" I should not be sacrificing my own con- 
science were I doing that which I felt bound to 
do, Baldwin. Would you have me teach my 
children that this world, which they regard as 
the kingdom of a just and loving God, whose 
supremest desire is the innocence and happiness 
of His creatures, is in reality the battle-field or 
the playground of physical forces, without 
thought or conscience ; nay, much worse, is the 
creation either of a principle of good per- 
petually allying itself to a principle of evil, or 
of a dreadful unity which permits and furthers 
good and evil alike ? What would you think 
of me were I to tell my children that all that 
they had learned of God and Christ is false- 
hood ; and that the true gods of the world are 
the serenely heartless, the foully blood-thirsty 
gods of early Greece, of Phoenicia, and Asia 
Minor ? You would certainly think me a bad 
father. Yet this old mythology represents 
with marvellous accuracy the purely scientific 
view of the world, the impression given by the 
mere contemplation of Nature, with its con- 
flicting and caballing divinities, good and bad, 
black and white, resisting and assisting one 
another, beneficent and wicked, pure and filthy 
by turns. The chaos, the confusion, the utter 
irresponsibity, which struck the framers of old 



42 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



myths, is still there. All these stories seem to 
us very foolish and very horrible: an om- 
niscient, omnipotent Zeus, threatened by a 
mysterious, impersonal Fate, looming dimly 
behind him ; a Helios who ripens the crops 
and ripens the pestilence; a Cybele forever 
begetting and suckling and mutilating ; we laugh 
at all this. But with what do we replace it ? 
And if we look at our prosaic modern nature, 
as is shown us by science, can we accuse the 
chaotic and vicious fancy of those early ex- 
plainers of it ? Do we not see in this nature 
bounty and cruelty greater than that of any 
early gods, combats more blind than any 
Titan's battles, marriages of good and evil 
more hideous than any incests of the old 
divinities, monster births of excellence and 
baseness more foul than any Centaur or Mino- 
taur; and do we not see the great gods of the 
universe sitting and eating the flesh of men, 
not unconsciously, but consciously, serenely, 
and without rebuke ? " 

" That 's a curious observation of yours," 
put in Rheinhardt; "but it would appear as if 
there had been a difference between the two 
generations ; that with the Semitic the feeling 
of right or wrong, of what ought or ought 
not to be in the abstract, entirely over- 
shadows mere direct perception, scientific per- 
ception of Nature, and considerable phenomena,- 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 43 

not with respect to their necessity, but with 
reference to their ethical propriety; while, as 
you remark, the Aryan race " 

But Rheinhardt's generalizations were alto- 
gether wasted upon his two friends. 

"Such is Nature," pursued Vere, with im- 
petuousity ; " and in it you scientific minds bid 
us to seek for moral peace and moral safety. 
How can we aspire, as to the ideal of moral 
goodness, to that which produces evil — ineffa- 
ble, inevitable evil ? How measure our moral 
selves against this standard ; how blush before 
this unblushing god ? How dare we look for 
consolation where our moral sense, if enlight- 
ened, must force us to detest and to despise? 
Where, then, shall we seek the law, the rule by 
which to govern our lives? And the horror of 
horrors lies in this — that we are forced to con- 
ceive as evil all that which is at variance with 
the decrees of Nature, of this same Nature 
which is forever committing evil greater than 
any of us could commit, — herein, that we can- 
not rebel. As long as Nature meant the 
Devil, it might be opposed ; but we know 
that for us there can be no good save in obey- 
ing Nature — obeying that which is not good 
in itself ; it has, as if with intentional 
malice, forced us to bend, to walk in its 
ways ; if we refuse solidarity with it, we are 
sucked into a worse evil still. The sight of 



44 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



individual misfortune can never bring home 
this horrible anomaly as does a study of the 
way in which whole peoples have been sacrificed 
first to sin, then to expiation ; of the manner n 
which every rebellion against this evil-polluted 
nature, every attempt of man to separate him- 
self, to live by a rule of purity of his own, has 
been turned into a source of new abominations. 
Am I to show all this to my children, and say 
to them : Only Nature is good ; and Nature is 
the evilest thing that we can conceive, since it 
forces to do evil and then punishes. Would a 
belief in Ashtaroth or Moloch not be as moral 
as this one ?" 

Baldwin waited till Vere had come to an 
end. 

"I can quite understand all that you feel, 
because I have felt it myself/' he said, unshaken 
by his friend's vehemence. " I was telling you 
of the terrible depression which gradually came 
over me as I perceived what the world really 
was ; and which for a couple of years at least, 
made me live in constant moral anguish, espe- 
cially after the death of that friend of mine 
had, as I told you, brought home to me how 
the disbelief in a future life took away the last 
possibility of believing in a just and merciful 
Providence. I revolved in my mind every pos- 
sible scheme for conciliating 'the evil inherent 
in the world with our desire for good. Chris- 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 45 



tianity, Buddhism, Positivism, they all assumed 
to quiet our conscience with the same hollow 
lie ; Positivism saying that the time would 
come when Nature and good would be synony- 
mous; Christianity reminding us that man 
may have but a moment wherein to become 
righteous, while God has all eternity; always 
the same answer, the evil permitted or planned 
in the past is to be compensated by the good 
in the future ; agony suffered is to be repaid in 
happiness, either to the worn-out, broken soul 
in another world, or to the old, worn-out hu- 
manity in this. Such answers made me but 
the more wretched by their obvious futility : 
How efface the indelible? can God himself 
undo the accomplished, cancel that which has 
been committed and suffered? Can the God of 
religion, with His after-death, Paradise joys, 
efface the reality of the agonies endured upon 
earth ? Can the inconceivable of Positivism 
efface with the happiness of the men of the 
twentieth century the misery of the men of the 
nineteenth ? Can good cause evil in the same 
individual, — the warmth and honor of the old 
man cancel the starvation and cold and despair 
of the youth ? Can evil suffered be blotted out, 
and evil committed be erased ? Forgiven per- 
haps ; but effaced, taken from out of the 
register of the things that have been, never. 
This plea of the future, whether in this world 



4 6 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



or another, what is it, but a half hour which the 
mercy of man gives to his God wherein to 
repent and amend and reprieve ; a half hour of 
centuries indeed, but a half hour none the less 
in eternity, and to expiate the evil done in a 
lifetime of infinitude ?" 

" What is the use of going on like that ? " 
asked Rheinhardt ; " why cannot you two be 
satified with the infinite wickedness of man- 
kind, without adding thereunto the wickedness 
of Nature ? As Wolfram von Eschenbach re- 
marked already six centuries ago, — ' Ihr nothigt 
Gott nichts ab durch Zorn ' — try and reform 
man, but leave God alone. But, in truth, all 
such talk is a mere kind of rhetorical exercise, 
brought into fashion by Schopenhauer, who 
would have been horrified at the waste of time 
and words for which he is responsible/' 

" We shall certainly not make Nature repent 
and reform by falling foul of her/' answered 
Vere ; " but at all events, by protesting against 
evil, however inevitable, we shall prevent our- 
selves being degraded into passive acceptance 
of it." 

" I was going to say," went on Baldwin, 
" that I went through all these phases of moral 
wretchedness. And while they lasted, the 
temptation to have done with them, to free 
myself by a kind of intellectual suicide, was 
constantly pursuing me ; it seemed as if every 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 47 



person I spoke with, every book that I opened, 
kept repeating to me, — t Disbelieve in your 
reason, and believe in your heart ; that which 
may be impossible to your logic, may yet be 
possible to God's goodness.' It seemed to me 
as if I would give every thing to be permitted 
to lay down my evil convictions, to shut my in- 
tellectual eyes, to fall into spiritual sleep, to 
dream — to be permitted to dream those beauti- 
ful dreams which consoled other men, and 
never again to wake up to the dreadful reality. 
But I saw that to do so would be mean and 
cowardly ; I forced myself to keep awake in 
that spiritual cold, to see things plainly, and 
trudge quietly forward upon that bleak and 
hideous road. Instead of letting myself believe, 
I forced myself to doubt and examine all the 
more; I forced myself to study all the sub- 
jects, which seemed as if they must make my 
certainty of evil only stronger and stronger. I 
instinctively hated science, because science had 
destroyed my belief in justice and mercy; I 
forced myself, for a while, to read only scientific 
books. Well, I was rewarded. Little by little 
it dawned upon me that all my misery had 
originated in a total misconception of the rela- 
tive positions of Nature and of man ; I began 
to perceive that the distinction between right 
and wrong conduct had arisen in the course of 
the evolution of mankind, that right and wrong 



4 8 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



meant only that which was conducive or detri- 
mental to the increasing happiness of humanity, 
that they were referable only to human beings 
in their various relations with one another; 
that it was impossible to explain them, except 
with reference to human society, and that to 
ask for moral aims and social methods of mere 
physical forces, which had no moral qualities, 
and which were not subject to social relations, 
or to ask for them of any Will hidden behind 
those forces, and who was equally independent 
of those human and social necessities which 
alone accounted for a distinction between right 
and wrong, was simply to expect one set of 
phenomena from objects which could only pre- 
sent a wholly different set of phenomena : to 
expect sound to be recognized by the eye, and 
light and color to be perceived by the ear. In 
short, I understood that man was dissatisfied 
and angry with Nature, only because he had 
accustomed himself to think of Nature as only 
another man like himself, liable to human 
necessities, placed in human circumstances, and 
capable, therefore, of humafi virtues and vices, 
and that I had been in reality no wiser than 
the fool who flew into a rage with the echo, or 
the child who strikes the table against which it 
has hurt itself." 

"I see," said Vere, bitterly, " your moral 
cravings were satisfied by discovering that 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. 49 



Nature was not immoral, because Nature had 
never heard of morality. It appears not to 
have struck you that this utterly neutral char- 
acter of Nature, this placid indifference to right 
and wrong, left man in a dreadful moral soli- 
tude ; and might make him doubt whether, 
since morality did not exist for Nature, it need 
exist at all ; whether, among all these blind 
physical forces, he too might not be a mere 
blind physical force." 

"On the contrary," answered Baldwin, 
"when I came to understand why morality 
was not a necessity for Nature, I also under- 
stood why morality was a necessity for man : 
the rule of the road, the rule that each coach- 
man must take a particular side of the street 
with reference to other coachmen, could cer- 
tainly not exist before the existence of streets 
and of carriages being driven along them ; but 
without that rule of the road, gradually estab- 
lished by the practice of drivers, one carriage 
would merely smash into another, and the thor- 
oughfare be hopelessly blocked. Thus it has 
been with morality. Rules of the road are 
unnecessary where there are neither roads nor 
carriages ; and morality would be unnecessary, 
indeed, inconceivable, where there are no 
human interests in collision ; morality, I now 
feel persuaded, is the exclusive and essential 
qualification of the movements of an assem- 



SO QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 

blage of men, as distinguished from an assem- 
blage of stones, or plants, or beasts ; the qualifi- 
cation of man's relation, not with unsentient 
things, but with sentient creatures. Why go 
into details? You know that the school of 
philosophy to which I adhere has traced all dis- 
tinctions of right and wrong to the perceptions, 
enforced upon man by mankind, and upon 
mankind by man, of the difference between 
such courses as are conducive to the higher 
development and greater happiness of men, 
and such other courses as are conducive only to 
their degradation and extinction. Such a 
belief, so far from leaving me in moral solitude, 
and making me doubt of my own moral nature, 
brings home to me that I am but a drop in the 
great moral flood called progress ; that my own 
morality is but a result of the morality of mill- 
ions of other creatures who have preceded me 
and surround me now ; that my morality is an 
essential contribution to the morality of mill- 
ions of creatures who will come after me ; that 
on all sides, the more society develops, there is 
a constantly increasing intricacy of moral con- 
nection between the present, the past, and the 
future. If I refuse to press on in the ranks of 
good, there will be so much the less havoc 
made in the ranks of evil ; if I fall, those on 
either side of me will be less united and less 
vigorous to resist, those following after me will 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. S l 



stumble ; I must therefore keep in my place, be 
borne by the current mass of moral life, instead 
of being passed over and trampled by it." 

Vere did not answer. He looked vaguely 
toward the window, at the ghostly billows of 
the downs, dark blue, bleak, unsubstantial, 
under the bright cold windy sky. The wind 
had risen, and went moaning round the farm, 
piping shrilly in all its chinks and crannies, and 
making a noise as of distant waters in the firs of 
the common. Suddenly in the midst of the 
silence within doors, there came from the ad- 
joining room a monotonous trickle or dribble of 
childish voice, going on breathless, then halting 
suddenly exhausted, but with uniform regu- 
larity. 

" It is Willie reading the Bible to his grand- 
mother," remarked Rheinhardt ; " the old lady 
is left at home with him on Sunday evenings, 
while her husband goes to the village. It is a 
curious accompaniment to your and Baldwin's 
pessimistic groanings and utilitarian jubila- 
tions." 

" I think," remarked Baldwin, after a mo- 
ment's fruitless listening to catch the words 
from next door, " I think in some matters we 
unbelievers might take a lesson from our neigh- 
bors. I w r as very much struck to-day, while 
listening to Monsignore's sermon, with the 
thought that that man feels it his duty to 



52 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



teach others that which he believes to be the 
truth, and that we do not." 

" It is a priest's profession to preach, my 
dear Baldwin," put in Rheinhardt ; u he lives 
by it, lives off his own preaching and off the 
preaching of all the other priests that live now 
or ever have lived." 

" We unbelievers — I should rather say we 
believers in the believable " — answered Bald- 
win, " should all of us be, in a fashion, priests. 
You say that Monsignore lives off his own 
preaching and the preaching of all Catholic 
priests that ever have been. Well ; and do we 
not live spiritually, do we not feed our soul 
upon the truth which we ourselves can find, 
upon the truth which generations of men have 
accumulated for us ? If, in the course of time, 
there be no more priests in the world, I mean 
in the old sense, it will be that every man will 
be a priest for his own family, and every man 
of genius a priest for the whole of mankind. 
What I was thinking of just now is this: that 
this Monsignore, whom we consider a sort of 
clever deluded fool, and this old peasant 
woman, whose thoughts scarcely go beyond 
her village, are impressed with the sense of 
the responsibility incurred by the possession of 
what they consider superior truth — the re- 
sponsibility of not keeping that truth to them- 
selves, but participating it with others ; and 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF. Si 



that herein they both of them assume a posi- 
tion far wiser, far more honest, far nobler, than 
do we unbelievers, who say, i What does it 
matter if others know only error, as long as 
ourselves know truth ? ' " 

" You forget," answered Rheinhardt, " that 
both Monsignore and our landlady are probably 
persuaded that unless they share their spiritual 
knowledge with their neighbors, they will be 
responsible for the souls of those neighbors. 
And if you remember what may, in the opinion 
of the orthodox, happen to the souls of those 
persons as have been slightly neglected in their 
religious education, I think you will admit that 
there is plenty to feel responsible about." 

"You mean that there is nothing for us to 
feel responsible about. Not so. Whatever 
may happen to the souls of our fellows will 
indeed not happen in an after-world, nor will 
they suffer in a physical hell of Dante, or enjoy 
themselves in a physical Paradise of Mahomet. 
But there is, nevertheless, for the souls which 
we know, for the souls which look up to us for 
instruction and assistance, a hell. A hell of 
moral doubt and despair and degradation, a 
hell where there is fire enough to scorch the 
most callous, and ice enough to numb the 
warmest, and mud to clog and bedraggle the 
most feeble among us. Yes. There is a hell 
in the moral world, and there is a heaven, and 



54 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



there is God ; the heaven of satisfied conscience, 
the God of our own aspirations ; and from this 
heaven, from the sight of this God, it is in our 
power to exclude those most beloved by us. 
Shut them out because we have not the cour- 
age to see them shiver and wince one moment 
in the cold and the light of truth ; shut them 
out and leave them to wander in a world of 
phantoms, upon the volcano crust of that hell 
of moral disbelief, unaware of its existence, or, 
aware too late, too suddenly of the crater open- 
ing beneath their feet. That old woman in the 
next room is teaching, feels bound to teach, 
her child the things which she looks upon as 
truth. And shall a man like you, Vere, refuse 
to teach your children what you know to be 
true ? Will you leave them to believe that the 
world and man and God, the past and future 
and present, are wholly different from what 
they really are ; or else to discover, unaided, 
with slow anguish or sudden despair, that all is 
different from what they thought, that there is 
falsehood where they relied on truth, and evil 
where they looked up to good ; till falsehood 
and evil shall seem everywhere, and truth and 
good nowhere ? You spoke of the moral happi- 
ness and safety of your children ; will you let 
them consist in falsehood, and depend upon 
the duration of error? Will you let your chil- 
dren run the risk of losing their old faith, with- 



RESPONSIBILITIES OF UNBELIEF, 55 



out helping them to find a new one ? Will you 
waste so much of their happiness for themselves, 
and of their usefulness for the world ? " 

Vere did not answer; he remained as if 
absorbed in thought, nervously tearing the 
petals of a rose which stood in the glass before 
him. 

" Do please leave that flower alone, Vere," 
remonstrated Rheinhardt ; " that is just the 
way that all you pessimists behave — pulling 
to pieces the few pleasant things which nature 
or man has succeeded in making, because the 
world is not as satisfactory as it might be. 
Such a nice rose that was, the very apple of 
our landlady's eye, who picked it to afford you 
a pleasant surprise for supper, and you have 
merely made a mess of it on the table-cloth. 
That 's what comes of thinking too much about 
responsibilities. One does n't see the mischief 
one's fingers are up to." 

And Rheinhardt, who was a tidy man, rose, 
and carefully swept the pink petals and the 
yellow seeds off the table into his hand, and 
thence transferred them into a little earthen- 
ware jar full of dry rose leaves, which he kept, in 
true eighteenth-century style, on his writing- 
table 

" That is the difference of our philosophies," 
he remarked, with satisfaction ; " you tear to 
pieces the few roses that are given us, and we 



56 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



pick up their leaves, and get the pleasant scent 
of them even when withered/* 

" The definition is not bad," put in Baldwin, 
throwing a bundle of fagots on the fire, and 
making it crackle and flare up lustily, flooding 
the room with ruddy light. 

Vere turned away his face from the glow, 
and looked once more, vaguely and wistfully, 
into the bleak blueness of common and downs 
lying chill and dim in the moonlight. 

" What you have been saying, Baldwin/' he 
at last remarked, " may perhaps be true. It 
may be that it would be wiser to teach my 
children the things which I believe to be true. 
But you see I love my children a great deal ; 

and Well, I mean that I have not the 

heart to assume the responsibility of such a 
decision." 

" You shirk your responsibilities," answered 
Baldwin, " and in doing so, you take upon your- 
self the heaviest responsibility of any." 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY. 



By FRANCES POWER COBBE. 

Agnosticism, if we may trust some recent 
indications, is passing out of the jubilant stage 
and entering one of well-befitting seriousness. 
There lies the experience of a generation be- 
tween the delirious exultation of Harriet Marti- 
neau over her " Spring in the Desert," and the 
sober sadness of the writer in the last number 
of this REVIEW on the " Responsibilities of 
Unbelief." The creed that " Philosophy 
founded on Science is the one thing needful, " 
which the first considered to be " the crown of 
experience and the joy of life," has become to 
the second a burden and a sorrow — a " spring " 
indeed, but waters of Mara. " I have been 
shorn of my belief," says one speaker in Vernon 
Lee's dialogue ; " I am emancipated, free, 
superior ; all the things which a thorough 
materialist is in the eyes of materialists. But 
I have not yet attained to the perfection of 
being a hypocrite, of daring to pretend to my 
own soul that this belief of ours, this truth, is 
not bitter and abominable, arid and icy to our 
hearts." 

57 



58 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



No reader of this thoughtful and powerful 
paper can fail to see that the indignant antag- 
onism which the earlier blatant Atheism called 
forth, ought now to give place to mournful 
recognition of the later Agnosticism as a phase 
through which many of the most luminous in- 
tellects of our time are doomed to pass ; the 
light which is in them waning till the thin cres- 
cent disappears. That it will be renewed again in 
the lustre of its fulness is not to be doubted, 
for this Agnosticism is no unfaithfulness to the 
true God of love and righteousness. It is pre- 
cisely because the Agnostic fails to find that 
God where he persists in exclusively looking for 
Him — -namely, in the order of the physical 
world — that the darkness has fallen on his soul. 
Perhaps the example of Agnosticism, as the 
last result of a logically vicious method of 
religious inquiry, may not be useless in awaking 
us to the dangers of that method which has 
hitherto been used indiscriminately by friends 
as well as foes of faith. 

All methods of religious inquiry resolve them- 
selves into two — that which seeks God in the 
outer world, and that which seeks Him in the 
world within. Out of the first came the old 
Nature-worship, and dim chaotic gods with 
myths alternately beautiful and sweet, and 
lustful, cruel, and grotesque ; the Greek stories 
which Vernon Lee recalls of Zeus and Chronos 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY. 



59 



and Cybele, and the wilder tales of ruder races, 
of Moloch and Astarte, Woden and Thor. In 
" the ages before morality," the mixed char- 
acter of the gods drawn out of Nature, and 
who represented her mixed aspects of good and 
evil, was not felt to be incongruous or unworthy 
of worship. As morality dawned more clearly 
the gods were divided between good and evil, 
Ormuzd and Ahrimanes, Osiris and Typhon, 
the Devs and Asuras. Some ages later, in the 
deeply speculative era of Alexandrian philoso- 
phy, the character of the author of Nature and 
creator of the world presented itself as so dark 
a problem that many schools of Gnostics — 
Basilidians, Marcionites, Valentinians — -deemed 
him to be an evil or fallen god, against whom 
the supreme and good God sent Christ to recall 
mankind to a higher obedience. The loftiest 
point ever reached, or probably attainable, by 
this method of religion was the Deism of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ; and to 
reach it two things were needful not included 
in the problem — namely, that those who found 
so good a God in Nature should have looked 
for Him there from the vantage-ground of 
Christian tradition gained by the opposite 
method ; and secondly, that they should have 
been yet in ignorance concerning much in 
Nature which is now known, and so have raised 
their induction from imperfect premises. Pope. 



6o 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



the typical poet of this Deism, could say as the 
result of his survey of things : 

" One truth is clear — whatever is, is right." 

Tennyson, on the* other hand, who knows some- 
what of the doctrines of the " Struggle for 
Existence " and the " Survival of the Fittest," 
when he has cast his glance around on Nature, 
" red in tooth and claw with ravin," and on all 
her " secret deeds" of wastefulness of the seeds 
of joy and life — feels that he can only " fall " 

" Upon the great world's altar-stairs 
Which slope through darkness up to God." 

The second method of religious inquiry, 
which seeks for God in the inner world of spirit 
and conscience, leads to a very different con- 
clusion, even though it be but " in a glass 
darkly " that the mirror of the soul receives the 
Divine reflection, and many a blur of human 
error has been mistaken for a feature of the 
Divine countenance. The prophets of all time 
who have heard in their souls the voice of God 
and have cried aloud, " Thus saith the High 
and Holy One who inhabiteth eternity," and 
the faithful who have hearkened to them 
because their hearts echoed their prophecies, 
have been together keeping step, till now 
Christianity in all its more vitalized forms, and 
Theism as every where superseding the elder 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY. 



6i 



Deism, alike affirm the absolute goodness of 
God, discarding every thing in earlier dogmas 
repugnant thereto. The first method — the 
external — being the one to which Agnostics 
have exclusively had recourse, it follows in- 
evitably that the result is, as we see, the denial 
of religion, because they do not find in Nature 
what Nature (consulted exclusively) cannot 
teach, 

Of course the Agnostic may here interpose and 
say that the test of the truth of the second 
method must be to check it by the first, and see 
whether God, as He actually works in Nature, 
bears out the character which we derive from the 
testimony of our hearts. Such checking is every 
way right— nay, it is inevitable. No thoughtful 
man can avoid doing it, and encountering 
thereby all the strain of faith. But the differ- 
ence lies in this, with which method do we 
begin, and to which do we assign the primary 
importance? If we first look for God outside 
of us, we shall usually stop at what we find 
there. If we first look for Him within, we may 
afterward face with illumined eyes the mystery 
of Nature's shadows. The man who has found 
his God in conscience and in prayer may indeed 
shudder and tremble and "lift lame hands of 
faith, and grope " when he sees all the misery 
and agony of creation. But as he did not first 
find God in Nature, neither will he lose hold on 



62 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



God because Nature is to him inexplicable. He 
will fall back on the inner worship of God the 
Holy Ghost, the Teacher of all Mercy and Jus- 
tice; and trust that He who bids him to be 
merciful and just, cannot be otherwise Himself 
than all-merciful, all-righteous. He will, in 
short, exercise, and can logically exercise, Faith, 
in its simple and essential form — i. e. } Trust in 
One who has a claim to be trusted as a Friend 
already known, not a stranger whom he ap- 
proaches without prior acquaintance. But, on 
the contrary, the man who has even succeeded 
in constructing some idea of a good God out of 
the inductions of physical science, has nothing 
to fall back upon when (as happens to all in our 
generation) his researches, pushed further, seem 
to lead him, not to a perfectly Benevolent 
Being, but to one whose dealings with his crea- 
tion appear so blended of kindness, and of 
something that looks like cruelty, that he finds 
it easiest to leap to the conclusion that He has 
no. existence or no moral nature, rather than 
that He should be so inconsistent. 

These are the obvious results of the use 
of the two methods of religious inquiry, as used 
by men in all ages. But I have attempted to 
define them here, because I am anxious to 
draw attention to the fact (which I deem to be 
one of great importance) that modern Agnos- 
ticism, as distinguished from earlier forms of 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY, 



63 



disbelief, has bound itself to the physical- 
science method, and renounced appeal "to the 
inner witness to the character of God, by adopt- 
ing the Darwinian theory of the nature of con- 
science, and thereby discrediting for ever its 
testimony, as regards either morals or religion. 
This theory, as all the world now knows, is that 
of Hereditary Conscience ; the theory that our 
sense of right and wrong is nothing more than 
the inherited set of our brains in favor of the 
class of actions which have been found by our 
ancestors conducive to the welfare of the tribe, 
and against those of an opposite tendency. 
According to this doctrine there is no such 
thing as an " eternal and immutable morality/' 
but all orders of intelligent beings must by de- 
grees make for themselves what Vernon Lee 
aptly calls a " Rule of the Road/' applicable to 
their particular convenience. 1 Thus at one 

1 Mr. Darwin himself, in his " Descent of Man," expressly 
instances the worker-bees as a case wherein "conscience" 
might approve of the massacre of our brother drones. It may 
not be inopportune to readers who have not made a study of 
the philosophy or history of ethics that the older schools of 
" independent " morality taught that actions were c< right " or 
" wrong," as lines are* 'right" (*. straight) or " wrung 
from" straightness, and that (according to Clarke's definition 
of the doctrine) "these eternal differences make it fit for the 
creatures so to act, they lay on them an obligation so to do, 
separate from the will of God and antecedently to any pros- 
pect of advantage or reward." Mr. Herbert Spencer abjures 
both the doctrine and the metaphor. He says : "Acts are 
called good or bad according as they are well or ill-adjusted to 
ends." Now this is exactly what the grand old terms Right 
and Wrong do not imply. A line is not " right" because it 
pans in a certain direction, but because of its character of 
strath tn ess. 



6 4 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



and the same blow the moral distinctions of 
good and evil are exploded and reduced to the 
contingently expedient, or inexpedient, and the 
rank of the faculty whereby we recognize them 
is degraded from that of the loftiest in human 
nature to that of a mere inherited prejudice. 
How this theory overturns the foundations of 
morals, and by so doing deprives religion of its 
firmest basis, and so clears the way for Agnos- 
ticism, will become more evident the more we 
reflect on the matter. A better example of the 
workings of the doctrines could not be desired 
than that afforded in a passage in this very ar- 
ticle, which bears the stamp of a fragment of 
autobiography. " Baldwin/' the character in 
the dialogue, who obviously represents the 
writer's own views, after expressing the intense 
desire he has felt to believe in " the beautiful 
dreams which console other men," goes on to 
say : 

" Instead of letting myself believe, I forced myself to doubt 
and examine all the more ; I forced myself to study all tlie 
subjects which seemed as if they must make my certainty of 
evil only stronger and stronger. I instinctively hated science, 
because science had destroyed my belief in justice and mercy ; 
I forced myself, for a while, to read only scientific books. 
Well, I was rewarded. Little by little it dawned upon me 
that all my misery had originated in a total misconception of 
the relative positions of nature and of man ; I began to per- 
ceive that the distinction between right and wrong conduct 
had arisen in the course of the evolution of mankind, that 
'right and wrong meant only that which was conducive or 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY. 



65 



detrimental to the increasing happiness of humanity, that 
they were referable only to human beings in their various rela- 
tions with one another ; that it was impossible to explain 
them, except with reference to human society, and that to ask 
for moral aims and moral methods of mere physical forces, 
which had no moral qualities, and which were not subject to 
social relations, or to ask for them of any Will hidden behind 
those forces, and who was equally independent of those 
human and social necessities which alone accounted for a dis- 
tinction between right and wrong, was simply to expect one 
set of phenomena from objects* which could only present a 
wholly different set of phenomena ; to expect sound to be 
recognized by the eye, and light and color to be perceived by 

the ear Why go into details? You know that the 

school of philosophy to which I adhere has traced all distinc- 
tions of right and wrong to the perceptions, enforced upon 
man by mankind, and upon mankind by man, of the differ- 
ences between such courses as are conducive to the higher de- 
velopment and greater happiness of men, and such other 
courses as are conducive only to their degradation and extinc- 
tion " (p. 47). 

Here is the doctrine of Inherited Conscience 
clearly posed as lying at the very root of Ver- 
non Lee's Agnosticism, and closing the door 
against the longed-for belief that his intuitions 
of justice and mercy had their origin in the 
Maker of all. The importance of this matter 
is so great, and yet has been so little noticed 
from the theological side, that I trust I shall be 
pardoned for devoting to it the greater part of 
the space at my disposal in this article. 1 

1 When Mr. Darwin did me the honor to send me the ad- 
vance sheets of his " Descent of Man," wherein he first clearly 
broached this theory, I wrote to him that, in my humble judg- 



66 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



Hitherto religion has either been avowedly- 
founded (as by the second method of inquiry- 
above described) on the moral nature of man, 
or. has appealed to it, as the ratification of the 
argument drawn from external Nature. The 
highest faculty in us — as we deemed it to be — 
was on all hands admitted to be the nearest to 
God, and the one fittest to bear witness regard- 
ing Him. " God is with mortals by conscience" 
has been generally assumed as an axiom in 
theological argument, and Christianity itself, by 
its dogma of the Third Person in the Trinity, 
only consecrated the conviction of the wisest 
Pagans that there is " a Holy Spirit throned 
within us, of our good and evil deeds the 
Guardian and Observer, who draws toward us 
as we draw toward Him." 1 On the side of 
philosophy, this same moral faculty was by the 
long line of noblest teachers, beginning in 
Plato and culminating in Kant, allotted a place 
of exceptional honor and security. Moral truths 

ment, the doctrine, if ever generally accepted, would sound 
the knell of the virtue of mankind. Mr. Darwin smiled in 
his usual kind way at my fanaticism, as he doubtless deemed 
it ; but so far am I from retracting that judgment, that I am 
more than ever convinced, after ten years' observation, that 
this doctrine is a deadly one, paralyzing moral activity, and, 
in the long run, bringing on the spiritual death of Atheism. It 
may be of some interest to mention that when preparing this 
book, Mr. Darwin told me he had never read Kant, and ac- 
cepted with reluctance the loan which I pressed on him of 
Semple's translation of the " Metaphysic of Ethics." He re- 
turned it in a few days, after, I believe, a cursory in- 
spection. 
1 Seneca. 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY. 



67 



they held to be " necessary " truths, and our 
knowledge of them intuitive and transcenden- 
tal ; and even the lower schools, while making 
a different test of the morality of actions, uni- 
formly allotted to the sense of moral obligation 
a supreme place in human nature. 

How changed is the view we are permitted 
by Darwinism to take of this crowned and 
sceptred impostor in our breasts, who claimed 
so high an origin, and has so base an one ! 
That " still small voice " to which we were 
wont to hearken reverently, what is it then, but 
the echo of the rude cheers and hisses where- 
with our fathers greeted the acts which they 
thought useful or the reverse — those barbarous 
forefathers who howled for joy round the 
wicker images wherein the Druids burned their 
captives, and yelled under every scaffold of the 
martyrs of truth and liberty ? That solid 
ground of transcendental knowledge, which we 
imagined the deepest thinker of the world had 
sounded for us and proved firm as a rock, what 
is it but the shifting sand-heaps of our ancestral 
impressions, — nay, rather let us say, the men- 
tal kitchen middens of generations of savages ? 

Is this revolution in our estimate of con- 
science of so little consequence, I ask, that our 
clergy take so little notice of it ? To me it 
seems that it bears ruinously, and cannot fail 
so to bear, first on morals, then on religion. 



68 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



With the detection of conscience as a mere 
prejudice must end the solemn farce of moral 
struggle, of penitence, and of remorse. As well 
might we be expected to continue so to struggle 
and to repent, holding this view of conscience, 
as the company at a stance might be expected 
to continue to gape awestruck at an apparition 
which has been pounced upon and exposed as 
a vulgar and ignorant medium ! And with the 
discrediting of conscience as a divinely con- 
stituted guide and monitor must end the possi- 
bility of approaching God through it, and of 
arguing from its lessons of righteousness that 
He who made it must be righteous likewise. 

The thinker who will sift this doctrine of 
Hereditary Conscience, and divide the grains of 
truth which it doubtless contains from the 
large heap of errors and assumptions, will do 
the world a noble service, and effect more to 
dispel Agnosticism than by any other piece of 
philosophical work. That there is something 
in our consciousness (sometimes confounded 
with conscience) which may be duly traced to 
inheritance, is probable — perhaps certain. That 
there is much else which cannot be so traced is 
much more certain. To prove that such is the 
case it would be enough to analyze two well- 
defined and almost universal sentiments. One 
is the anticipation common to mankind in all 
ages, and the motif oi half the literature of the 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY. 



6 9 



world, that Justice will be done — done somehow, 
somewhere, by some Power personal as God, or 
impersonal as the Buddhist Karma. Consider- 
ing that no experience of any, even of the very 
happiest generation of mankind, can have jus- 
tified, much less originated, this expectation, it 
is clear that it must have had some source 
altogether different from that of an hereditary 
" set of brains," arising out of accumulated and 
persistent experience. Another sentiment com- 
mon to all civilized nations in our day is the 
duty of preserving human life, even in the case 
of deformed and diseased infants. This senti- 
ment is not only, like the anticipation of Justice, 
unauthorized by experience, and inexplicable 
by the theory that moral judgments arise out 
of such experience, but is in diametrical oppo- 
sition to any thing which experience can have 
taught concerning the welfare of the race, being 
in precise contradiction of and rebellion against 
the great Darwinian law of " the survival of the 
fittest." Were our moral impressions merely 
the result of ancestral experience, the nations 
of Europe at this hour must have come to re- 
gard the Spartan practice of infanticide as one 
of the most sacred and imperative of moral 
obligations. I have never heard, however, that 
even the Chinese, who have been killing their 
superfluous babies by thousands for ages, have 
professed to consider it a duty, or any thing 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



better than a convenient practice to do so. 
Their governors, indeed, have again and again 
issued edicts against infanticide as a crime.. 

Thus the doctrine of Hereditary Conscience 
fails to explain some of the most salient phe- 
nomena for which it proposes to account ; nay, 
even in one of the instances chosen by Mr. 
Darwin himself, egregiously misses the mark. 
In the " Descent of Man," the author describes 
repentance as the natural return of kindly feel- 
ings, when anger has subsided. But even his 
favorite observation of animals might have 
shown him that animosity, once excited between 
dogs or horses, has no tendency to subside and 
give place to friendship, but rather to become 
more intense ; and in the case of men, the old 
Roman knew better when he remarked pro- 
prium humani ingenii est odisse quern loeseris. 
Every bitter word and unkind action (as those 
who have ever said or done them know only 
too well) render the return to kindly feelings 
more and more difficult, till nothing short of a 
mental revolution (rarely effected, I imagine, 
without the aid of religion) enables us to for- 
give those whom we have injured. The really 
childish caricature of the awful phenomena of 
repentance and remorse which the amiable phil- 
osopher, who it would seem never needed re- 
pentance, devised out of the depth of the 
scientific imagination, is, I venture to think, a 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY. 



71 



fair specimen of the shallowness of this new 
theory of ethics. 

It is deeply to be deplored that this doctrine 
should have found acceptance on the authority 
of one, who, however great as a naturalist, was 
neither a moralist nor a metaphysician, at a 
juncture when the tendencies of the age all 
drive us only too much in the direction of 
physical inquiry as the road to truth. The 
passionate love for Nature's beauty, the ardent 
curiosity concerning her secrets, which belong 
in these days not only to artists and men of 
science, but more or less to us all, have turned 
the whole current of thought toward natural 
external phenomena. And simultaneously with 
this set of the tide, the increasing keenness and 
subtlety of our feelings and width of our sym- 
pathies cause us to notice the evil latent among 
these natural phenomena, as was never done by 
any previous generation of men. We bring 
things to the bar of moral judgment which our 
fathers never dreamt of questioning. We 
writhe as the long panorama of suffering and 
destruction is unrolled before our eyes from the 
earliest geologic time to the present ; nor can 
we sit down contented as they were with such 
explanations of it as a reference to " Adam's 
transgression," or pages of the easy optimism 
of Archbishop King. Our minds are distracted, 
our very hearts are wrung by such thoughts as 



72 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



those exposed in Mill's " Essays on Religion/' 
even while we justly charge him with exaggera- 
tion of the evil, and understatement of the 
happiness of the world. We cannot blink at these 
questions in our generation, and it is a cruel 
enhancement of our difficulties that at such a 
time this hateful doctrine of Hereditary Con- 
science should have been broached to drive us 
out of the best shelter of faith — the witness of 
a reliable moral consciousness to the righteous- 
ness and mercy of our Maker. 

Nor does the evil stop even here, for the 
action and reaction of morals and religion on 
one another is interminable. Evolutionism has 
originated the theory of Hereditary Conscience^ 
and that theory has had* a large share in pro- 
ducing modern Agnosticism, and again Agnos- 
ticism is undermining practical ethics in all di- 
rections. Vernon Lee feels deeply the u Re- 
sponsibilities of Unbelief." But are not such 
sentiments the last failing wail of melody from 
a chord already snapped ? Let me explain why 
I think that almost every virtue is destined to 
perish one after another, or at least to shrink 
and fade, if Agnosticism prevail among man- 
kind. 

Morality, on the Agnostic projection, of 
course limits its scope to the field of human 
relations. It is supposed to have risen out of 
them, and to have no meaning beyond them. 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY. 



73 



Man has brothers, and to them he owes duty. 
He knows nothing of a Father, and can owe 
him no duty. Altruism remains the sole virtue, 
Piety being exploded. In the language of 
divines, the Second great Commandment of the 
Law is still in force, but we have dispensed 
with the First. 

Here at the starting-point arises a doubt 
whether Agnosticism does not fling away, with 
the obligation to love God, the best practical 
help toward fulfilling its own law and loving 
our neighbor. The sentiments which religion 
teaches would appear to be the very best quali- 
fied to produce Altruism. For one so amiably 
constituted as Mr. Darwin, ready to love all his 
neighbors by nature, and where he quarrels 
with them to return equally naturally to friendly 
sentiments, there are at least ninety-nine per- 
sons who " love their friends, and hate their 
enemies," and feel at the best only indifference 
to those very large classes of their fellow- 
creatures included in the stupid, the vulgar, 
and the disagreeable. Probably every Christian 
and Theist who has tried conscientiously to 
" love his neighbor as himself" has experienced 
an imperative necessity to call up ideas and 
feelings derived from his love of God to help 
him in the often difficult achievement. It has 
been the idea of a perfect and all-adorable 
Being, on which his heart has reposed when 



74 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



sickened with human falsehood and folly. It 
has been in the remembrance of God's patience 
and forgiveness to himself that he has learned 
pity and pardon for his offending brothers. 
One of the greatest philanthropists of the past 
generation, Joseph Tuckerman, told Mary Car- 
penter that when he saw a filthy degraded 
creature in the streets, his feelings of repulsion 
were almost unconquerable, till he forcibly re- 
called to mind that God made that miserable 
man, and that he should meet him hereafter in 
Heaven. Then came always, he said, a revul- 
sion of feeling, and he was enabled to go with a 
chastened spirit about his work of mercy. The 
notion (which I have heard a noted Atheist ex- 
pound in a lecture) that we cannot love our 
brothers thoroughly till we have renounced our 
Father and our eternal home, seems to me sim- 
ply absurd. If universal benevolence be the 
one supreme virtue, then again we may say, 
" si Dieu n exist ait pas il fandrait l y invent er y " 
if it were merely that belief in Him should help 
us to that virtue. 

But it is not only on the side of God that the 
morality of Agnosticism stops short. All the 
Personal duties which, on the Kantian system, 
a man " owes to himself," and which were incul- 
cated foremost of all by the older religious 
ethics, because they tended directly to the su- 
preme end of creation and the approach of 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY. 



75 



finite souls to divine holiness, these lofty per- 
sonal duties are retained in the new ethics only 
on the secondary and practically wholly insuffi- 
cient grounds of their subservience to the gen- 
eral welfare of the' community. 

Thus, of the three branches of the elder 
morality corresponding to the threefold aspects 
of human life — Religious Duty, which was laid 
on man as a son of God ; Personal Duty, laid on 
him as a rational free agent ; and Social Duty, 
laid on him as a member of the community — 
the last alone survives in Agnostic ethics. 
Two thirds of the provinces of morality have 
been abandoned at one sweep, as by retreating 
Rome in her decadence. But, I ask, is the 
hope of preserving the remainder from the 
barbarian hosts of selfishness and passion any 
the better ? Is it more easy to make men 
philanthropists when we have given up the 
effort to make them saints? Surely it is noth- 
ing of the kind. Even for our neighbor's own 
sake there is nothing we can ever do for him 
half so useful as to be ourselves the very 
noblest, purest, holiest men and women we 
know how. The recognition of the supremacy 
of Personal Duties appears to be the first step 
toward the right performance of the highest 
Social Duties. 

Deprived of two thirds of its original empire 
and dethroned from its high seat of judgment, 



7 6 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



does there yet perchance remain for Duty, as 
understood by the Agnostic, some special sanc- 
tions, some more close and tender, if not equally 
lofty and solemn claims, than those which be- 
longed to it under the older Theistic schemes ? 
Such would seem to be the persuasion of many 
amongst those who have felt the " Responsi- 
bilities of Unbelief," perhaps of all the best 
minds amongst them — Mr. Morley, Mr. Harri- 
son, George Eliot, and now, obviously, of Ver- 
non Lee. This thoughtful writer is actually of 
opinion that the belief in an immortal life is an 
"enervating" one, and that there is a "moral 
tonic " in believing that " there is no place be- 
yond the grave where folly and selfishness may 
be expiated and retrieved, and that, whatever 
good may be done, must be done in this world." 
It is hard to realize the mental conditions out 
of which such a judgment as this can have 
arisen. It is true that an immeasurable pity, an 
almost limitless indulgence, seems the natural 
sentiment which should flood the heart of one 
who looks on his brother-men, and thinks that 
all their pains and sorrows are to lead only to 
the grave ; that all their aspirations and strug- 
gles and prayers are destined to eternal dis- 
appointment ; that all. the love of which their 
hearts are full is ready to be spilled, like 
precious wine, in the dust. But these mourn- 
ful feelings are assuredly the " enervating" 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY, 



77 



ones, for nothing can be so enervating as de- 
spair. What " moral tonic " can there be in 
the conviction that, whether we labor or sit 
still, sacrifice our life-blood for our brother, or 
sacrifice him to our selfishness, it will soon be 
all one to him and to us ? 

We have all heard much from pulpits of the 
virtue of Faith and the virtue of Charity ; but 
I think we hear too little of the virtue of Hope, 
which completes the trinity and is an indivisi- 
ble part of it. We are so constituted that it is 
impossible for us to exercise Charity persist- 
ently without both Faith and Hope, like Aaron 
and Hur, to sustain our sinking arms. Without 
Faith in the divine germ of goodness buried in 
every human breast, we cannot labor for the 
higher welfare of our brother, or afford him 
that nobler sympathy, without which to give 
all our goods to feed him profiteth nothing. 
And without Hope in a future, stretching out 
before him in infinite vistas of joy and holiness, 
we cannot attach due importance to his moral 
welfare ; we cannot measure the sin of misguid- 
ing and corrupting him, or the glory of leading 
him to virtue. Nay, in a larger sense, Philan- 
thropy and the Enthusiasm of Humanity, the 
very flowers of Agnosticism, must wither, if 
unwatered by Hope. We must needs work on 
one hypothesis or the other. Either all men 
are destined to an immortal existence, or else 



78 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



they will perish at death, and the earth itself 
will grow old and sustain life no longer on its 
barren breast, and then all the hopes and vir- 
tues and triumphs of the human race will be 
buried in oblivion, no conscious mind in all the 
hollow universe remembering that Man ever 
had existence. 

Is it not a paradox to say that the former 
idea is " enervating/' and the latter a " moral 
tonic ? " A moral curare ', I should take it to 
be, paralyzing will and motion, 1 

But if Agnostic ethics be thus miserably de- 
fective—if they be narrow in their scope and 
poor in their aim of conferring transitory happi- 
ness on a perishing race — if they have no basis in 
a poor reason or a divinely taught conscience, 

1 We are now told, as the latest grand discovery of Darwin- 
ism, that Man in some generations to corne, will be a u tooth- 
less, hairless, slow-limbed animal, incapable of extended 
locomotion. His feet will have no division of toes, and he 
will be very averse to fighting." — See Nineteenth Century ', 
May, 1883. I congratulate those who think it sufficient re- 
ward to anticipate " posthumous activities " among these 
" men of the future ! " Even as I write this page a profound 
remark on the heart-paralyzing effects of Agnostic hopelessness 
on a very noble intellect has come to my hand. In a letter to 
the Spectator, May 12, 1883, Mr, Eubule Evans, writing of 
George Eliot, says : " Whoever holds that human life is little 
better than a vast waste-heap of blighted possibilities will, 
however tender he may be toward the objects of specialized 
affection, yet naturally fail in that keenness of love toward all 
living, which is the only safeguard against the subtler process 
of cruelty. Beneath her philosophy lay a heart feminine when 
stirred to tenderness toward the individual, but hopeless, and 
therefore in a way merciless, toward the race. The atmos- 
phere of the worker is the leaden atmosphere of fate in which 
human frailty meets no mercy, and human longing can find no 
hope/* 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY. 



79 



but appeal only to a shifting and semi-barbarous 
prejudice — if, even from the point of view of 
sentiment, they lack the motives which are 
best calculated to inspire zeal and self-sacrifice ; 
then it is surely time for high-minded Agnostics 
to recognize that their laudable efforts to con- 
struct a morality on the ruins of religion has 
failed, and must ever fail. The dilemma is 
more terrible than they have yet contemplated. 
They have imagined that they had merely to 
choose between morality with religion, or 
morality without religion. But the only choice 
for them is between morality and religion to- 
gether, or the relinquishment both of morality 
and religion. They were sanguine enough to 
think they could rescue the compass of Duty 
from the wreck of Faith ; but their hope was 
vain, and the well-meaning divers among them 
who have gone in search of it have come up 
with a handful of sea-tangle. 

Much false lustre has, I think, been cast over 
a creed which is in truth the " City of Dreadful 
Night," by the high Altruistic sentiments and 
hopes of certain illustrious Agnostics. George 
Eliot's aspiration to join the " choir invisible/' 
whose voices are " the music of the world " ; 
Mr. Frederick Harrison's generous desire for 
" posthumous beneficent activity," have thrown, 
for a time, over it a light as from a sun which 
has set. For myself, I confess there seems to 



8o 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



me something infinitely pathetic in those long- 
ings of men and women, who once hoped for a 
" house, not made with hands, eternal in the 
heavens/' and " the spirits of the just made 
perfect/' but who are fain now to be content 
with such ghosts of Hope as these. The mil- 
lennium of Darwinism for the " surviving 
fittest " of the human race — those toothless, 
hairless, slow-moving creatures, with all peace- 
ful sentiments bred in, and all combative ones 
bred out — is, after all, no such vision of para- 
dise as that even the purest Altruist can find in 
it compensation for the belief that all the men 
and women w T hom he has ever known or loved,, 
are doomed to annihilation long before that 
new race — such as it will be — can arise. 

The misery of his hopeless creed had been 
felt, I cannot doubt, in all its bitterness by the. 
writer of this eloquent paper. No more affect- 
ing words have been penned for many a day 
than those in which he makes one of his speak- 
ers exclaim : — " The worst of death is not the 
annihilation of ourselves. Oh, no, that is noth- 
ing." The intolerable agony he has truly felt 
to be the apprehension of the hour when the 
soul we love will not merely depart and leave 
us lonely on the shore, but be itself lost — 
drowned in the ocean of existence never to live 
again. We may easily read between the lines 
of his dialogue, that it was the first shock 



AGNOSTIC MORALITY, 



Si 



of this tremendous, this unendurable thought 
which drove Vernon Lee out of the " Palace of 
Art," to seek, if it might be found, the solution 
of the " riddle of the painful earth." Alas! 
that so noble an intellect, destined, I cannot 
doubt, to exercise wide influence in the coming 
years, should have found no better explanation 
of that enigma than the wretched doctrine of 
Hereditary Conscience, and the supposed dis- 
covery that Nature contains no moral elements, 
and has no moral power behind it ! A happier 
conclusion might surely have been reached by 
the mind which penned the burst of eloquence 
placed in the mouth of the speaker Vere : " It 
is -love which has taught the world for its 
happiness that what has been begun here will 
not for ever be interrupted, nor what has been 
ill done for ever remain unatoned ; that the 
affection once kindled will never cease, that the 
sin committed can be wiped oat, and the good 
conceived can be achieved ; that all within 
which is good and happy, and for ever strug- 
gling here, virtue, genius, will be free to act 
hereafter ; that the creatures thrust asunder in 
the world, vainly trying to clasp one another in 
the crowd, may unite for ever." That love 
which invents immortality, is itself, I think, the 
pledge and witness of immortality. It is the 
Infinite stirring within the finite breast. 



-NATURAL RELIGION."* 



By EDMUND GURNEY. 

It would be useless and impertinent to occupy 
space with any detailed account of a work which 
every possible reader of this paper must have 
read ; and almost equally so to lavish praise on the 
spirit of peace and progress in which it is con- 
ceived, and on the well-known style, at once so 
weighty and so brilliant, in which it is executed. 
Its author's object is briefly this : putting " su- 
pernaturalism " and dogma on one side, to show 
that the "natural" Universe of facts and feel- 
ings supplies, in actual existence and operation, 
diverse elements of religion, which only need ; 
to be generally recognized for what they are, 
and to be consciously united, to make up a 
Religion — something fully worthy of that name, 
though in relation to the individual it might be 
called Culture, and in relation to the world 
Civilization. In dispersion, these diverse ele- 
ments are comparatively weak ; they are misun- 
derstood, often held to be opposed to religion, 
and even mischievously discordant among them- 
selves ; one set of men neglects one of them, 
and another another. Like the sticks of a fagot, 

* i{ Natural Religion." By the author of " Ecce Homo." 
London ; Macmillan, 1882 ) pp. viii, 262. 

82 



"NATURAL RELIGION: 7 83 

they will find their true strength in union ; 
and the possibility of their union is that they 
do, as a matter of fact, appeal to a common in- 
stinct and excite a common feeling, that of de- 
voted self-forgetting admiration. This feeling, 
which is no other than worship, is specifically 
religious ; and when it has found its true and 
complete Object, it will be a single Religion, 
embodied in a single universal church, " a great 
commanding union of hearts and minds," the 
invigorating influence of which will be felt in 
every department of life. 

There can, of course, be no doubt as to what 
the elements must be. The same threefold 
division of the higher life has commended itself 
even to those who differ completely in their 
point of view with regard to it. With Plotinus, 
the three constituents are roads for attaining 
that elevation of mind in which the Infinite may 
be apprehended, and which " I myself," he says, 
" have realized but three times as yet, and Por- 
phyry hitherto not once." They are that " de- 
votion to the One," to the ordered unity of 
things, which is the mark of the natural phil- 
osopher ; the love and moral purity of devout 
and ardent souls; and "the love of beauty, 
which exalts the poet." With Goethe, they are 
the elements of Culture ; which he sums up as 
" Life in the Whole, in the Good, in the Beau- 
tiful." With our author, as we have seen, they 



84 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



are the sufficient elements of Religion ; not, as 
in the idea of Plotinus, mere paths to an un- 
known god, but actual present possession and 
worship : and he discriminates them as con- 
cerned with the eternal laws of the Universe, 
with Humanity, and with Beauty, or more 
briefly as Science, Morality, and Art. 

The argument by which this view is sup- 
ported is naturally aggressive as well as con- 
structive ; and on the aggressive side it seems 
unanswerable. Parts of the same lesson have 
been taught in different, though not less im- 
pressive, ways, by Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. 
Ruskin, and the Positivist writers ; but it is 
here re-enforced with all the weight of the au- 
thor's individuality. We can have nothing but 
admiring assent for his exposure of the petti- 
ness and vulgarity of what he calls the lower 
life ; and of the incapacity of the existing dog- 
matic religions to meet the needs of the higher 
life, by supplying a synthesis which may em- 
brace all its elements in one " great atmosphere 
of thought and feeling." Nor can we differ as 
to the importance, for human welfare, of Science, 
Morality, and Art, — of a wider knowledge of 
Natural Laws, of a wider love of Humanity, and 
a wider appreciation of Beauty. Our doubts be- 
gin when we turn to the positive additions 
which the present view of Natural Religion has 
made to the previous enlightened conceptions 
on these subjects. 



' NA TURAL RELIGION. 



85 



And to glance first at the elements separ- 
ately ; the book gives the impression that its 
author has been habitually in very much closer 
contact with Morality, especially as studied in 
relation to history and politics, than with 
Science and Art. His picture of the scientific 
man, perpetually wrapt in contemplation of 
Law and Unity, is a very common ideal with 
those who appreciate the vastness of the leading 
scientific conceptions, and whose imaginations 
are impressed by the miraculous command of 
space and time which modern discovery has 
brought, but who have never been lost in the 
wilderness of laborious detail through which 
almost every investigation has to pass. The 
sunlit peaks are often better seen from a dis- 
tance than from the myriad rough and tortuous 
paths by which they are actually scaled. And 
in a vast amount of scientific work, which is con- 
cerned with facts, there is much that is positively 
alien to the contemplation of laws ; for the re- 
lation of facts to laws is perpetually not only 
obscure, but of a kind which could not possibly 
come within the purview of Science. Things 
simply are thus and thus, in behavior or topog- 
raphy ; the manner of their having become 
so has been, of course, in every stage a natural 
process, as is the gradual accumulation of par- 
ticular grains of sand in one particular heap ; 
but to our eyes the greater part of natural 



86 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



process must be a myriad-fold accident, which 
might have given quite different results without 
any apparent violation of law. Even so large 
and interesting a law as that of natural selec- 
tion everywhere presupposes individual varia- 
tions which, for us, are strictly accidental. And 
as the course of differentiation is followed, and 
the attention narrowed down from the domi- 
nating laws of a multitude of species, which are 
constant under a multitude of conditions, to the 
uniformities prevailing among smaller and 
smaller groups, the facts which, for aught we 
can see, need not have been as they are, occupy 
more and more of the ground, and seem often 
as remote from deduction, and from any vital- 
izing conception of law, as the streets and 
squares of a city, which a cabman has to master. 
Even in the simpler region of inorganic matter, 
each of the most familiar chemical compounds 
has qualities which cannot be accounted for, 
which could not have been prophesied, and 
which can only be registered ; and this would 
remain equally the case, if the wildest dreams 
of the mechanical theory were realized. But 
even apart from this, and supposing the peaks 
to be always more or less in view, can their 
effect upon us be reckoned on as an unchang- 
ing quantity? The conceptions which really 
open up new fields in the physical universe, 
such as the atomic theory, the correlation of 



" NA 7' URAL RELIGION. 



87 



forces, evolution — conceptions which have a 
very different effect on the imagination from 
the gradual filling up of these territories with 
subordinate laws and facts — are necessarily few 
and far between ; and in their merely scientific 
aspect the mind adapts itself to them with 
really terrible ease ; so that even the last and 
greatest of them will probably be not much 
more exciting to our grandchildren than gravi- 
tation. And the very search for larger and 
larger and more and more uniting concep- 
tions, which has an exciting character of 
its own, is in some degree opposed to the ex- 
citement of novelty : to find any thing in the 
future as exciting as the correlation of forces, 
we should have to find some force which could 
not be correlated ; which in the interests of 
unity would scarcely be desirable. Supposing 
that the "vast unity," which our author him- 
self admits to be " not yet discoverable or name- 
able," is really the God whom we seek to know, 
and supposing it were discovered and named, 
so that (to take the simplest department only) 
all known quantitative laws — those of the ve- 
locity of falling bodies, of the diffusion of gases, 
and a thousand others — could be embraced in a 
single formula ; it seems certain that inter- 
est in Nature would then and there begin to 
decline. The forward path would be closed ; 
search and pursuit would have lost their great 



88 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



incentive ; the imagination, set in motion (as 
our author describes it) by glimmering regulari- 
ties and suggestive analogies, would find its 
function gone ; and worship of the hugeness of 
the conception would fade away in an atmosphere 
of unaspiring familiarity. 

Fortunately there seems at present no danger 
of the various forward paths converging on this 
paralyzing goal ; laws, like objects, stand side 
by side, e, g. y those of magnetic currents and 
those of heredity ; and nothing like an all-em- 
bracing unity presents itself. But then in ceas- 
ing to strain after the idea of such a unity, we 
cease to find mere regularity so very imposing. 
How is invariableness of operation in Time a 
grander idea than mere size or distance in Space ? 
of which latter one of the most imaginative as 
well as one of the ablest of recent' men of sci- 
ence, the late Professor Clifford, declared his 
unmitigated contempt. He would certainly not 
have prostrated himself before the geological 
millenniums and the stellar distances, to which 
our author oddly points as bringing the great- 
ness of God home to us by the fact of its having 
been actually computed. And a case like Clif- 
ford's would almost alone serve to show that, if 
there are occasions when these conceptions 
overpower us with a primitive unreasoning de- 
light in which the utter relativeness of vastness 
in Space and Time can be forgotten, such expe- 



'NATURAL RELIGION." 



8 9 



rience is something to be just accepted in 
thankfulness, not to be reproduced at will, or 
pressed on others in the way of a truth or a 
duty ; for the cold touch of reason may at any 
moment make it look both illogical and vulgar. 

Against such objections our author would 
perhaps still urge the scientist's actual devotion 
to his employment. Luckily for us mortals, 
such devotion, in the sense of an ant-like im- 
pulse toward the day's work and a certain solid 
contentment in it, is far from rare. But ants 
must not despise one another ; and while any 
busy man may feel for vapid idlers the sort of 
contempt here specially attributed to students 
of Nature, it must surely be exaggeration, in 
these days of specialism and division of labor, 
to describe the feeling of an average man of 
science toward an average man of business as 
" the pity of an apostle for a heathen. " Our 
author scornfully regrets that men who might 
be scientific discoverers often " end ignomin- 
iously in large practice at the bar." It is of 
course a loss to the world when rare talents are 
wasted on work which does not demand them ; 
but that is not now the question. What we are 
considering is the worker's normal attitude tow- 
ard the object of his study ; and experience, I 
think, shows that the scientist's devotion to 
science is not normally devotion to an " infinite 
Unity " or a " beatific vision " ; that in fact it 



9Q 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



partakes about as little of the nature of worship, 
and about as much of the nature of interested 
and healthy activity concentrated on successive 
limited points, as the intelligent lawyer's devo- 
tion to that extremely unscientific and un-unified 
object, the Common Law of England. 

This somewhat unreal treatment of the pur- 
suit and pursuer of scientific studies might more 
readily pass muster, as the outcome of the au- 
thor's sanguine and powerful imagination, did it 
not directly connect itself with deeper flaws in his 
argument. Thus he perpetually urges on us 
the comparison of the scientific attitude toward 
Nature and the old Hebrew attitude toward the 
Eternal. But must not the religious sense of 
awe in the Jew have had at least some reference 
to the conviction, so strikingly and repeatedly 
expressed, that the ways of its Object were not 
only higher than his ways, but unsearchable, 
past finding out — a conviction which would 
scarcely enliven the occupation of the scientific 
investigator ? Again, a great point is made, in 
this comparison, of the fact that knowledge of 
natural laws is the means of securing the maxi- 
mum of safety and well-being in life, so that 
scientific men describe knowledge of Nature as 
of no less paramount importance than Jewish 
prophets described worship of God. But such 
knowledge the author himself represents as di- 
rected mainly to prevention and circumvention, 



"NATURAL RELIGIONS 



9 I 



and as resulting in a " transaction with Nature," 
a " propitiation " of a blind and inhuman Power, 
which might crush us but for our cunning and 
pliability. Surely, then, when one passes on 
from the special knowledge and the knower's 
application of it, to his general emotional atti- 
tude toward the Power itself, we shall hardly 
see there any very striking parallelism with the 
Jews' confident self-abandonment to an initiat- 
ing, disposing, and protecting Providence. This 
further topic, however, of the inhuman or anti- 
human aspect of Nature, will find a more con- 
venient place in the sequel ; and from Science 
we may now pass for a moment to Art. 

Here there is less to complain of, as far as 
the description of the worshipping attitude is 
concerned. In mere point of quotable author- 
ity, the gospel of Beauty has great advantages : 
Goethe and Schiller, the very word " Hellen- 
ism," are far stronger reeds to lean on than any 
supposed declarations of scientific agnostics and 
sceptics u that their pursuit tends to worship/' 
It is indeed beyond question that the habit of 
enthusiastic admiration is a much more real, 
natural, and necessary characteristic of artistic 
than of scientific activity ; while for the world 
at large the difference is even more marked. 
For, in the first place, a very far larger amount 
of direct labor is necessary for really intelligent 
glimpses of the unities of Nature than for true 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



enjoyment of some form of Art ; and, in the 
second place, those persons are exceptional for 
whom, through a natural bent of mind, the 
admiring awe, say, in the conservation of energy, 
can fill up and transform as many moments of 
life as the admiring delight in favorite poems, 
pictures, or melodies. And this difference will 
only come out more strongly, if it exists in spite 
of adverse conditions, and if Art in our day is 
really handicapped (as our author suggests) by 
having a less robust set of professors, and so 
presenting less of " healthy and manly vigor," 
than its rival, Science. But if the character 
claimed for Art is tolerably secure on its own 
ground of Beauty, we cannot but feel a little of 
the old unreality at the point where it is carried 
beyond that ground, and made to help out 
Science in the proof that Nature, with all its 
faults, can still be worshipped for being awful 
and One. We are told that, owing to the ap- 
pearance of this feeling in Art toward the end 
of the last century, artists for the first time 
" began to feel that their pursuit was no desul- 
tory amusement, but an elevating worship." 
The clear sense of " something priestly and 
prophetic" in the poetic mission is dated from 
the age of Goethe and Wordsworth, and has 
" increased the self-respect of artists ever since." 
This is a puzzling argument. It cannot surely 
mean that this sense of a unity in Nature has 



NATURAL RELIGION. 



93 



a more exalting influence than other, and 
especially than supernatural, conceptions have 
had and can have, where they did or do exist. 
" Desultory amusement " would be an odd 
description of the art of the " Eumenides," the 
" CEdipus Coloneus," and the " Divina Comme- 
dia." Our author has himself expressly shown 
how in ^Eschylus and Sophocles " religion and 
patriotism were undistinguishably blended " ; he 
remarks on the Christian orthodoxy of Michael 
Angelo, and Dante, and Milton, and how 
iEschylus and Dante "were greater than the 
Sceptics " ; he draws attention to the fact that, 
when the fervor of Pagan religion, as such, 
became impossible in Greece, " the great im- 
aginative poets come no more." One cannot 
but reflect that on his own theory there was a 
glorious opportunity for them to reappear in 
the succeeding century, when the scientific and 
unifying study of Nature was receiving from 
Aristotle the most momentous impulse it has 
ever known ; but let that: pass. As applied to 
our own century, the argument, if it is to do the 
work required of it without ignoring the inspira- 
tion and dignity that poetry may draw from 
supernatural conceptions, is bound to mean that 
poets who have definitely turned their backs on 
those conceptions and so have foregone that 
special inspiration and drgnity, have been 
rediscovering their inspiration and dignity 



94 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



in the conception of Nature as a vast and 
single Power. Nothing less than this will 
serve: for to suppose that, in a poetical 
mind where those further conceptions exist, 
they can be kept separate from the view 
of what Nature would be without them, is 
futile ; and the page in which our author is re- 
duced, by the exigencies of his argument, to 
eliminate from Wordsworth's view of the Uni- 
verse the Christian faith which in the same 
breath is described as having " preserved him 
from pessimism/' is perhaps the only approach 
to a juggle in his book. But when we look at 
the poets of exclusively " natural " Nature, 
does his account at all hold? Is it any awful 
Unity that they reveal to us ? Is it not, on the 
other hand, in the Pagan qualities of Nature, in 
her beautiful and sensuous aspects, that Mr. 
Swinburne and his fellows have sought and 
found their inspiration? Beyond Goethe, the 
most companionless of great men, can our 
author point to a single instance in support of his 
contention ? while even in Goethe, the indiffer- 
ence to the moral principle, to which he himself 
draws attention, is fatal to the sense of Unity 
as he describes it* 

Further difficulties suggest themselves in re- 
spect of the place that Art would hold in our 
author's ideal community ; where " every one 
would have some object of habitual contempla- 



• NA TURAL RELIGIONS 



95 



tion, which would make life rich and bright to 
him, and of which he would think and speak 
with ardor." As regards pictorial and plastic 
Art, its relation to the religion of the future 
seems equally full of doubt, whether the re- 
ligion be " natural" or " supernatural." For if, 
on the one hand, it is hard to imagine an ap- 
propriate mythology, and therefore a mode of 
concrete embodiment, for the spiritual elements 
of such defecated " supernaturalism " as may 
reject the dogmas and miracles of current re- 
ligions, we have on the other hand no assurance 
that the arts of visible representation can enjoy 
the widest and deepest sort of popular life 
apart from such elements. And as regards the 
place of the other art of representation, Poetry, 
in a community where Morality is as natural and 
little noticed an element as the air men breathe, 
there is a deeper and more disturbing question. 
It may dispense with supernaturalism : can it 
dispense with evil ? How far, judging from ex- 
perience, may not its scope and sublimity be 
held to depend on the existence in the world of 
a large proportion of sin and suffering? Life is 
to be indefinitely brightened ; but can a great 
and various human literature dispense w r ith 
shadows as completely as Fra Angelico's pict- 
ures of angels ? Will Othellos be written when 
Iagos are impossible ? Will Satan be an epic 
hero when he is impotent ? Does it not look as 



9 6 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



if the levelling up of life to conditions where 
mental and spiritual conflicts will have largely 
ceased in attainment and contentment, must 
level down a large proportion of the great 
poetic heights ? So far from the mark of this 
ideal community being, as our author proph- 
esies, that genius will be " of ordinary occur- 
rence " there, may not imaginative genius lose 
its pabulum in the absence of contrasts, just as 
humor would in the absence of incongruities? 
And may not days of full contentment prove 
unfavorable to moments of rapture ? 

To pursue these questions would be here out 
of place ; and I gladly turn to the third depart- 
ment of life, — that in which our author shows 
himself in his full strength, — the department of 
Morality, or Religion on its social and political 
side. It is here that his strong imaginative 
grasp of history, and of large aspects of human 
nature, gets its fair chance ; and the defects in 
his argument, which may invalidate his conclu- 
sions as to present and future possibilities, will 
still leave his work almost unassailable on 
purely historical ground. What, for instance, 
can be truer than his glance at the opposite 
errors of Fatalism and Titanism, at the fate of the 
men who underrate and of the men who over- 
rate the effective force of their own wills? 
How striking is his range of illustration: e.g., 
where the quality of determination to accept 



''NATURAL RELIGION." 



97 



the truth of the Universe, however disagreeable, 
is exemplified in the attitude respectively 
assumed toward the lying court prophets, 
toward Pharisaism, and toward the secularized 
Middle-Age Church, by the Hebrew prophets, 
primitive Christianity, and the Reformers ! 
What reality he gives to the conception of He- 
brew prophecy, not only in its continous grasp 
of social and political phases, but in its limita- 
tions : e. g., its failure to recognize that even a 
prophet may be something else besides true or 
false, namely, mistaken ; and its denunciation 
of the worship of natural forms, addressed to a 
particular nation under particular conditions, 
and therefore irrelevant to the truly religious 
element in Greek nature-worship ! Even if we 
demur to the summing up of Jewish history as 
" the dealings of a certain human group with 
Necessity," how impressive remains his picture 
of the Bible as a whole, as one book, treating of 
the chequered fates of a nationality which 
merges at last into a world -religion ; as an 
" Epic of Human Action " with a practical and 
temporal aim, exhibiting through a history of 
centuries the fundamental antithesis of inspira- 
tion and rules, of living and dead Morality, and 
leaving it " in the act of revolutionizing the 
world but also as a fragment, peculiarly 
likely to be misunderstood and abused by literal 
and limited interpretations ; so that the attempt 



98 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



of the Puritans " to rise once more to the same 
general view of human affairs " fails, " because 
they have no clue to the centuries immediately 
behind them " ! What width and clearness in 
his views of the formation of theologies and re- 
ligions ; shown, e. g. y in his passing descriptions 
of the older theologies as busying themselves 
quite as much with laws as with causes, and 
drawing no sharp line between natural and su- 
pernatural events, and of the gradual change of 
method through which Science assumed the 
domain of law, and Theology of supposed sus- 
pensions of law ; and again, in his account of 
the distinction between scientific and imagina- 
tive knowledge, and of the unfortunate conse- 
quences to Religion of the earlier predominance 
of the latter ; and, above all, in his disentangle- 
ment of the two conceptions mixed up in every 
moral religion — laws, including penalties, and 
the worship of Man — specially illustrated in the 
rise of Catholicism, the " marriage between 
Rome and Jerusalem/' and in the " Christian 
legalism," which was bound to supervene, where 
"the free morality" had become the religion of 
races only just ripe for the legal stage ! What 
novelty he can give even to trite themes: e. g. y 
in his notice of the inherent pugnacity and mu- 
tually destructive effects of partial religions ; 
and in his admission that Religion, like origi- 
nality, is apt to be troublesome, and has been at 



'NATURAL RELIGION: 



99 



times more mischievous than the cynicism of 
Secularity, while yet " the life of the soui " is 
vindicated in the ardor that characterizes all re- 
ligions, not merely true religions ! And with 
what rapid and pregnant touches he brings out 
order among the crossing and confusing cur- 
rents of the great stream : e. g„ in his brilliantly 
drawn-out comparison of the higher Paganism, 
of primitive Christianity, and of Science, to the 
three stages of childhood, youth, and manhood, 
and specially his vindication, as against Schiller, 
of the faults of Christianity as those of youth, 
not of old age ; in his contrast of Paganism as 
it appeared in its decrepitude in the older civili- 
zations, and in its new birth as a corrective of 
the Christian and monastic reaction ; in his brief 
sketch of Religion as the great state-builder, from 
Moses, through Mohammed, Gregory, the Teu- 
tonic reformers, the Pilgrim Fathers, on to the 
prophet of Utah ; and especially of the primarily 
national and revolutionary character of Chris- 
tianity, of its compromise with Rome, and the 
grandeur of Latin Christianity — that Holy Ro- 
man Empire, which " is to Rome what the 
Christian Church is to Judaism, the resurrection 
of a fallen nationality in an idealized shape " — 
and then of the gradual break-up of the con- 
solidated world-church, and the spasmodic ef- 
forts of national States, as in Scotland and even 
in the France of the Revolution, to preserve the 
LofC. 



liOO 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



idea of a public religion ! How trenchant, again, 
are the criticisms in which his views of the past 
are brought to bear on the present : e. g n his 
exposure of the vague and idle notion that 
there might be a sort of return to classical Pa- 
ganism, as though it had been the invasion of a 
Semitic religion, and not the inevitable course 
of development, which put the old fascinations 
to flight ; his demonstration of the fortuitous 
nature of any apparent alliance between the 
misnamed " atheistic" tendencies of modern 
Science and the modern spirit of Revolution ; 
his conception of the aspect that our national 
faults may present, when magnified in the total 
working of one nation on another, of England 
on India ; his exposure of the want of free 
adaptation of means to ends in ecclesiastical 
politics, seen in the fantastic revivals called ref- 
ormations, made by " those who cannot see the 
end," and so " fix their eyes, as the next best 
thing, on the beginning" ; his scorn of the hol- 
low apology for private sects of supernatural 
religionists in a secular State, that they are a 
return to the conditions of primitive Christian- 
ity, — -to the conditions of the Church which 
" defied and vanquished philosophy," while " its 
modern imitation is retiring before it," and the 
" private judgment which the apologists appeal 
to is on all hands rejecting supernaturalism " ! 
How impressive, too, if we can look at the 



■ NA TURAL RELIGION." IOL 



words simply as they would strike us in a book 
of history, is his description of nationality as a 
sort of atmosphere round individual members 
of a nation, which, when any shock makes the 
individual conscious of it, becomes religion — a 
thesis characteristically illustrated by the trans- 
formation of the Jewish nationality into Judaism 
by the waters of Babylon, and by the behavior 
of the American in Europe, preaching America 
in season and out of season ; and how skilfully 
he uses the history of great institutions, spring- 
ing up for the most part in an unreasoning and 
half-conscious way, and flourishing, without fear 
of damage from antiquarian researches, so long 
as they have a visible and palpable use, to sup- 
port his conception of a Church, not as a society 
where membership depends on opinions, but as 
a social organism into which a man is born, able 
to be disowned by him only when it refuses to 
make itself co-extensive with culture and civili- 
zation ! How convincing, lastly, are the pas- 
sages where he touches on the absence of any 
firm conception of the origin, raison d' etre, and 
future of the State, and of any such general 
view of human affairs as Hebrew prophecy in 
an archaic manner supplied ; and where he 
urges that history can only cease to be a chart- 
less sea, on which men take short aimless voy- 
ages or from which they shrink back appalled, 
by vindicating the interpretation of human so- 



102 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



ciety as not only its proper business, but as a 
prime part of religious teaching ! 

But this instinct for viewing things histori- 
cally, which lights up so many portions of the 
argument, seems in some degree answerable for 
what I cannot but think a grave weakness in 
the argument, taken as a whole. For, after all, 
the great problem which our author is facing is 
the problem of the present and the future ; he 
himself emphasizes this again and again,, Our 
need, and his, is for a religion which the most 
civilized men of this generation may recognize 
as the common essence of views and sentiments 
hitherto regarded as disparate or antagonistic ; 
in order that, having recognized it, they may 
promulgate it among their less enlightened fel- 
lows. Either there is, or there is not, such a 
religion, latent or rather dispersed in the actual 
views and sentiments of existing men. If, as 
our author holds, there is such a religion, which 
only needs to be set free and consolidated, it 
must have certain qualities in relation to the 
advanced class of minds which are to recognize 
and propagate it ; and the meaning of its prin- 
cipal terms, such as " God/' and " worship," 
and " religion " itself, must be a meaning which 
these advanced minds, here and now, do or can 
naturally attach to them. Now, that these 
same terms have borne other and lower mean- 
ings in relation to less advanced minds may be 



"NA TURAL RELIGION. " 1 03 

most interesting from the point of view of 
history and development ; but unless we are 
careful to distinguish our historical inquiry into 
what has been from our examination of what 
is or can be — to distinguish our survey of past 
religions from our search after that particular 
thing which we can hold, here and now, to 
deserve to be known and preached as Religion 
— those other meanings which the term has 
included will be apt to confuse the idea of this 
new thing which we are to denote by it ; even 
as in Ethics we are familiar with the confusion 
that results from mixing up questions about 
the original elements and historical formation 
of Conscience with questions about its nature 
and authority as a present fact. Now, in his 
account of Religion, our author seems uncon- 
sciously to take advantage of ambiguities inci- 
dent to this double way of regarding the sub- 
ject. Thus, he points out that benevolence has 
not always been thought one of the necessary 
attributes of God ; therefore, he argues, benev- 
olence cannot be regarded as part of the neces- 
sary connotation of the name of God. Perfect- 
ly true ; historically, of course, it cannot be so 
regarded. But this slips on into the conclusion 
that we, here and now, can worship as God a 
scientific order of things toward which, accord- 
ing to the author's own admission, our natural 
feelings may be at their best " fear and cold 



104 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



awe," and at their worst dread and despair — a 
conclusion which no amount of history can 
justify, simply because the point is one on 
which we interrogate, not history, but the 
minds and hearts of ourselves and our contem- 
poraries. 

" But," it may be said, " though benevolence 
is not an attribute of impersonal Nature, it is 
an attribute of Man in his moral aspect ; and 
Morality is one of the essential factors of the 
new i Natural Religion.'" This, however, only 
brings out the inherent flaw in our author's 
composite definition of Religion ; and the point 
demands particular attention. It is on regard- 
ing the elements of Religion as a whole, that 
he specially insists : this is the distinctive 
point in his view. " Man," he says, "has still 
grand spiritual interests, which are all-impor- 
tant to him, and which he partly feels to be so ; 
only, to his misfortune, he has ceased to think of 
them together in the whole which they consti- 
tute." It is to the breaking up and distribution 
of its elements " under other names or under 
no name," that he attributes the attenuation 
of the meaning of Religion. But things which 
are confessedly distinct can only be bound into a 
whole by some principle of union, external or in- 
ternal. The orthodox view of God or Provi- 
dence is a real bond, though an external one. He 
is regarded as a common originator, the source of 



%l NA TURAL RELIGIONS 



I05 



goodness and beauty as well as the ordainer of 
laws ; and in his case the disruptive shock, 
produced by the fact that in their operation the 
laws often show themselves the reverse of good 
and beautiful, can always be parried for many 
minds by the doctrines of probation and future 
compensation. Usually the fact that we, in 
our relative and conditioned lives and enforced 
balance of pleasures and pains, often declare 
that pleasure in the present " more than coun- 
terbalances " pain in the past, is taken advan- 
tage of, projected into the future, stripped of its 
relative character, and made a justification for 
the absolute sum-total of evil in the Universe. 
Even those whose logic refuses thus to embrace 
creative goodness and created evil under a single 
scheme, may still find in the mere notion of Om- 
nipotence a bond for the discordant elements ; 
for there is nothing incompatible between power 
and caprice ; and it is a coherent view that 
things which move us to delight and admiration, 
and things which to all eternity would seem 
to us ineffaceable blots on creation, have both 
emanated from a source more or less indifferent 
to our susceptibilities. But such a bond is 
denied to the elements of our author's religion ; 
for the simple reason that one of these, Beauty, 
is directly founded in man's feelings, and in his 
inalienable susceptibilities to pleasure and pain, 
and another, Moral Goodness, is indirectly so 



1 06 QUES TIONS OF BELIEF. 



founded, and that these are presented as coor- 
dinate with the third element, the dominance 
of immutable Law. Here, then, the discrepan- 
cies between what we approve and what we find 
in the world cannot be subsumed under any 
community of origin, or swallowed up in any 
uniting hypothesis. We -cannot appeal to 
Omnipotence : for however much we acknowl- 
edge the overmastering force of natural law, 
and our own practical submission to it, we have 
admitted into our Religion, as coordinate with 
the recognition of that objective law, the 
recognition of something else which is not 
practical and objective, but experiential and 
subjective, namely, our own feelings of appro- 
bation and repugnance, before which Omnipo- 
tence is powerless, or rather is meaningless ; a 
power that should make us approve of uncom- 
pensated pain, of that the essence of which is 
to be objected to, being not so much an impos- 
sibility as a contradiction in terms, and none 
the less so for being called Omnipotence. As 
long, then, as we reckon feelings, as well as 
objective facts among the elements of which 
our Religion is to consist, we find for these 
elements no inner bond, capable of replacing 
the external bond of suprahuman ordinance ; 
and the discordance can escape notice only so 
long as we take a resolutely one-sided view of 
Nature. The Eternal and Immutable cannot 



" NA TURAL RELIGIONS 107 

be cut in two ; and as soon as natural law, in 
the shape of a complete set of facts, 1 is set side 
by side with the joyful feelings that some of 
the facts inspire, and we are told to worship the 
combination the opposite sort of facts insists on 
putting in its claim for recognition, and the 
combination, falls to pieces. We may pour our 
oil and vinegar into one vessel, but we shall not, 
by so doing, conceal their antagonistic nature, 
or come to regard them with a homogeneous 
feeling. If they are to combine, it can only be 
in the menstruum of a supernatural theology. 

And in the present instance the pouring 
them into one vessel, be it observed, is a purely 
voluntary act on our part ; they are not so 
given us. A consideration on which our 
author more than once dwells suggests the 

1 I may be told that it is not facts, but their abstract unity, 
that we are to worship ; but this position is one to which our 
author does not keep at all consistently, and which, moreover, 
is only plausible so long as it is vague. The inspiring unity 
must obviously be a unity of law ; for no one could feel in- 
spired by the bare idea that a number of different things are 
included in a single sum-total of things. But then, as we have 
seen, no such single unity of law presents itself. And the 
more we concentrate ourselves on the separate or subordinate 
laws, the more difficult is it to work up any large emotion 
toward them in abstraction from their effects on human senses 
or on human fates. Nor does this apply less, but rather more, 
if we attempt to regard them under an aspect of unity which 
our author often substitutes for that of regularity, that, name- 
ly, of an external Power or Necessity ; for since we interpret 
the notion of Necessity from within outward, it seems to contain 
the relation to ourselves at its very core ; so that any emotion 
connected with it is peculiarly unable to leave that relation 
out of account. 



108 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



exact difference. He rightly insists that among 
the contents of Nature we must include Hu- 
manity itself, and the slow but sure develop- 
ment of altruistic sentiment and social order: 
these, then, may be rightly ranked under a 
common name with things as different from 
them in the sentiments they inspire as plague 
and earthquake, so long as the name employed 
has no reference to the inspired sentiments. 
Such a common name is Nature : it is a uniting 
conception, external to our sentiments, between 
things which have, whether we love or hate 
them, the common quality of occurring or ap- 
pearing in obedience to immutable laws quite 
independent of our individual will. This unity 
is one in the making of which we had no con- 
cern, and in which, therefore, things toward 
which we entertain the most opposite feelings 
may be forced upon us side by side. Religion, 
on the other hand, only has value for us as a 
principle of unity produced in our own hearts, 
and embracing things toward which, whether we 
regard them as attributes and actions of a single 
Supreme Person or as distinct phenomena, we 
experience a common feeling of ardor and 
devotion. It was thus a true instinct which 
led Goethe, to whom our author points as the 
great seer of unity of things, to preserve his 
conception from disintegrating influence by 
steadily turning his back on ideas of suffering 



NA TURAL RELIGIONS IO9 

and sacrifice. The worship of a unity of facts, 
apart from a unity of feeling, has as truly the 
note of superstition as to worship some single 
fact or object, e.g* y a reptile, that one dreads or 
dislikes ; and . to call it religious would be to 
fail in distinguishing Religion, as something to 
be acknowledged here and now from the his- 
toric religions in which such superstitions have 
freely mingled. 

If I seem to be pedantically pressing what 
after all is only a verbal point, I might at least 
reply that the importance I have attached to 
the matter of definition in no way exceeds that 
attached to it by our author himself. In his 
preface he attributes much of the disastrous 
contention which he deplores to the want of a 
true definition of Religion ; and it is by means 
of just definitions that he hopes to show the 
fundamental agreement between those who be- 
lieve that they are hopelessly opposed. But if 
words are of importance even here where our 
author believes that this fundamental agree- 
ment already exists, still more must they be so 
where it as yet does not exist ; and the words 
used have a weighty bearing on the actual propa- 
gation in an ignorant or hostile world of the 
truths on which he insists. We may admit 
those truths to the full, and still inquire what 
sort of difference in the practical acceptance of 
them will result from their being preached as a 



I IO QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



religion. Especially, how would such a mode 
of presenting them be likely to affect the revo- 
lutionary part of society, to whose enlighten- 
ment our author naturally attaches the greatest 
importance ? Viewed in this light, it seems to 
me that no more dangerous word than " Re- 
ligion " could be selected, under which to rank 
things as different as, on the one hand, the glow 
of healthy pleasure from an unselfish action or 
from a work of art ; and on the other, the fact 
(in our author's own words) that " if we could 
measure all the misery there is in the world, we 
should be appalled beyond description. " The 
realization of this latter appalling fact, which is 
as much an exemplification of natural law as 
that the sun will rise to-morrow, may be quite 
as important in the interests of mankind as 
access to the former sources of pleasure ; but 
the attempt to bring them all under one grand 
conception, and to carry them all down in a 
lump by the impressive connotation of the word 
Religion, seems not only unreasonable but prej- 
udicial. In the attempt to be grand and impres- 
sive, our appeal will lose the strength which 
would belong to it on the humbler ground of 
literal truth. It is as though one should try to 
get a child to swallow medicine by giving it at 
meal-times and representing it as food, which 
would merely produce in him a distrust of food 
in general, without making the medicine any 



"NATURAL RELIGION r 



III 



the more palatable. And as regards this ques- 
tion of preaching the godhead of Nature to the 
poor and needy, we must remember that in pro- 
portion as the conditions of a man's life are hard 
and narrow, is it impossible that he should 
take our author's all-round and impartial view 
of Nature. The view from the Brocken at 
which Goethe gazed, the gorse in bloom before 
which Linnaeus knelt, are not for all ; they 
would not be for all even could they be physi- 
cally presented at will. Absorption in the 
imposing and cosmical aspects of the Uni- 
verse presupposes some considerable degree of 
leisure and comfort ; the mind, like the body, 
needs room to expand. We shall not reconcile 
men to the rigor and narrowness of their lot by 
pointing to the stars ; but by appealing to their 
sympathy with their kind, and by opening up 
for them an imaginative interest in the future 
of this planet, through indications that the con- 
ditions of life on it are slowly improving. The 
religious imaginations of a favored few, soaring 
above mundane things, may be able to find 
rest and support in the Cosmos ; but if for the 
large majority of human toilers and suffer- 
ers the shelter of this half-way house is 
bound to fail, the religion that cannot reach 
Heaven will find its account, like Antaeus, in 
keeping to the earth. And within this narrower 
circle the distinction, for religious purposes, of 



112 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



the personal centre from that which encom- 
passes it, becomes still sharper ; for the terres- 
trial environment contains plenty of what is far 
more alien to the idea or possibility of worship 
than the unoffending stars. It is only by dis- 
tance that the hostile and depressing side of 
Nature's character vanishes. Poets may praise 
the moon for her beauty without thought of 
her bleakness and sterility, and the many will 
merely remain indifferent ; but if the earth 
and the life on it be so praised, the many will 
rebel. 

The lesson must, of course, be learned, as our 
author plainly sees. Of the texts which he sug- 
gests for the teachings of his " free clergy," one 
of the first is, that the path of happiness for the 
individual is and must continue a hard one, and 
that it is not blocked by simply artificial bar- 
riers, or able to be cleared by any sweeping 
change in the present social fabric. This is a 
most important thing to inculcate, and there is 
nothing to hinder any one from setting to work 
at inculcating it : but it is a piece of hard and 
repulsive common-sense ; it belongs to the laws 
of Nature, but not of Nature as in any way 
worshipful. Even a preacher who took his 
text from our author's own pages might find 
them somewhat less than inspiring : it may be 
a consolatory, but is hardly a religious, sugges- 
tion that " we become insensible to whatever 



'NATURAL RELIGION: 



113 



evil does not affect ourselves nor would the 
apology for life, that " though the happiness in 
it is not great, the variety is," be a hopeful 
theme to expound to a congregation of factory- 
hands. The thought that for very long to 
come many lots must perforce remain hard and 
narrow, and that perhaps forever happiness in 
life will be to many but a transient bloom, 
forces to the front an aspect of natural law 
which it seems like mockery to dignify with 
any sacred name. There is no dignity in pri- 
vation and suffering regarded as mere pieces of 
unavoidable fact. The Christian, in taking up 
his cross daily, may find that he can thank God 
for the cross as well as for the strength to bear 
it : but he is enabled to do this solely by that 
confidence in the ultima; t designs of Provi- 
dence which the hypothesis before us excludes ; 
his cross has dignity and sacredness as part of 
the design of a personal and moral Being. If a 
Stoic can ever be said to bless his cross, it must 
be simply provisionally, as a means, a school of 
discipline for learning endurance, and so re- 
ducing the burden of future crosses, — i. for 
reducing something which the very fact of his 
seeking to learn so to reduce it shows that he 
regards essentially as an evil ; and the moral 
beauty of Stoicism seems merely degraded and 
obscured, when the " natural " weight and hard- 
ness of the cross, and the pitiless laws of weight 



1 14 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



and hardness, just because they are eternal and 
irreversible, are put on a sort of equality of 
excellence with the human qualities that resist 
their pressure ; and are even combined with the 
very virtues which prevent the spirit from bow- 
ing beneath them, into an object of enthusiastic 
contemplation before which the spirit is to 
bow. 

But there is another and still more vital ob- 
jection to this compound religion. Religion 
must be for all) it must be looked on by its 
members as within the reach of all. A Utili- 
tarian may find it possible to hold that con- 
scious existence is desirable on the whole, and 
that his principle is being carried out in it, if 
only the number of- lives in which happiness 
preponderates exceeds those in which the bal- 
ance is irretrievably reversed ; but he will not 
go so far as to demand from one of these hap- 
less and uncompensated individuals any atti- 
tude toward such conditions but one of sick 
rebellion. Such an attitude on their parts 
will only be regarded by him as part of that 
unfortunate lot which, while regretting it, he 
holds to be an item of conditions that are on the 
whole desirable ; and it will thus introduce no 
fundamental discord into his view of the Uni- 
verse. But then he does not, or will not if he 
is wise, call his view of the Universe a religion. 
The connotation of that word seems alien to 



V NA TURAL RELIGION r I I 5 



the very possibility of such exclusiveness. It 
seems impossible for any one who holds a body 
of beliefs and sentiments in the manner for 
which our author contends — the only manner, 
that is, which justifies the treatment of them as a 
religion — consciously to admit that for others a 
similar holding of them is absolutely out of the 
question, and that consequently his " religion " 
is one in which these others are forever pre- 
cluded from sharing. I am only vindicating for 
"worship" the unique and lofty sense which 
our author throughout ascribes to it, when I 
say that a God whom we cannot all worship 
is a God whom none of us can worship : in the 
very act of admitting that to some, through no 
fault of character or perversity of judgment, he 
is and must be the reverse of worshipful, his 
worshippers cease to worship him. So funda- 
mental is this catholicity in the very notion of 
a lofty religion, that the notion dissolves in the 
presence of even a single case where the catholic- 
ity fails : touched by the mysterious, implacable 
reality of a single life in whose owner's refusal 
to worship we can see no moral or intellectual 
flaw, the divinity to which our souls have clung 
becomes a cloud. It will be no valid answer to 
this to say that the individual's power of wor- 
ship overflows the limits of his individual lot — - 
to point to instances showing that, even in the 
absence of supernatural hope, incurable personal 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



ill does not necessarily produce a spirit of rebel- 
lion or a yearning for general annihilation. I 
do not deny that the enlightened Stoic no less 
than the blind devotee may thus occasionally 
cast himself under the car of Juggernaut, and 
that the self-devoting impulse of the human 
spirit may make a car of Juggernaut even out 
of such an abstraction as destiny. Even so, it 
would be hard to prove that in his conviction 
of the inexorability of that destiny there 
lurked no shadow of doubt as to whether his 
eyes were truly in sight of the ultimate issue of 
things ; and such a doubt means hope. But let 
that pass : grant that we approve and admire 
such a spirit ; what is it that we admire ? It is 
surely the love for humanity, the sympathy 
with others' welfare, which the sufferer is able 
to oppose to his own fate ; and the religious 
and worshipful character of such love and sym- 
pathy I have not for a moment called in ques- 
tion : what I question is the religious and wor- 
shipful character of the fate itself. The in- 
human fate and the human feelings, the very 
things which our imaginary humanitarian wins 
our admiration by opposing one to the other, 
and which I regard as essentially opposed, are 
the very things which our author unites, under 
the theoretical title of divinity and by the prac- 
tical claim for worship. If he ever gets a Stoic 
to profess agreement with him, the spectacle 



' NA TURA L RELIGION. " 11? 



may be sublime, but it will be neither logical 
nor religious ; for, keeping steadily in view the 
point under discussion, — which is the attitude 
of the innocent sufferer toward nothing more 
nor less than the laws by which he suffers — we 
might fairly say that, so far as his attitude was 
not one of aversion and even hatred, it partook 
rather of the nature of fanaticism than of 
religion. If we call the spirit of wanton self- 
immolation " religious" in the Hindoo, it is 
with distinct reference to his want of enlighten- 
ment, and solely by that relative and historical 
use of the word to which I have already ad- 
verted — a use quite out of place in the gospel 
of the enlightened future. 

The result of our author's welding of non- 
personal law with personal virtue in his 
" natural " object of worship seems, in fact, 
simply to mar the true and beautiful aspect of 
that other great gospel of the future which is 
in its way a " natural religion " — the " Religion 
of Humanity." Positivism, though it does not 
profess to grapple with the mystery of evil, at 
least does not bend the knee before the system 
of natural law of which evil is a prominent 
feature ; indeed, its most popular English ex- 
ponent has treated even the more majestic 
aspects of " cosmic emotion " with a very scant 
ceremony. The consequence is that the re- 
ligion of Humanity is, up to a certain point, 



I 1 8 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



one in which all may share ; it has that essen- 
tial note of a religion. Many may find it inade- 
quate ; but no one will be excluded from it by 
discovering, in the deepest depths of his per- 
sonal experience, the incompatibility of the 
elements he is asked to unite. Whether the 
unique religious sentiment, on which the 
Positivist no less than our author insists, can 
permanently exist toward a Being whose gifts 
to us, as individuals, have come from no per- 
sonal love and comprehension, and who, for all 
our service, is powerless to help us in the direst 
straits of life, is a separate question. But 
even those to whom the apparently uncompen- 
sated evil in the world is too huge a fact for a 
" religion " to pass by with regretful acquies- 
cence, who find the mingled peace and ardor 
which belong to true " worship" impossible on 
such terms, and who cannot recognize the 
living head of a spiritual kingdom in an image 
wrought of even the finest human material, 
merely because it is bigger and grander than 
themselves, may still feel that the dream of 
such a deity is an imposing one ; and that the 
element which our author would contribute to 
it is one rather of weakness and disunion than 
of dignity and strength, not so much the head 
of gold as the feet of clay. 

The language I have used may seem to some 
unduly pessimistic : at any rate, it may be said, 



"NATURAL RELIGION: 



II 9 



if some things cannot be remedied, the less 
they are thought about the better. It would 
be easy to reply that the very prominence 
which one is impelled to give to these things 
may fairly be reckoned among the practical ill 
results to which a deification of impersonal law 
leads. The one is the natural answer to the 
other ; for if ever there is an excuse for calling 
attention to Nature's dark side, it is surely 
when one is asked to worship her. But in the 
present controversy no such excuse is needed : 
the book before us contains passages which 
make it impossible to doubt its author's own 
intense realization of that darker side. In 
addition to remarks already noticed, I may 
refer especially to the place where he recognizes 
how easily the existence either of individuals 
or of whole communities may sink below 
suicide-mark, and to the concluding pages in 
which he himself describes the pessimistic posi- 
tion. This man sufficiently shows that, who- 
ever else may, he at any rate does not sit light 
to the significance of irremediable evil, nor 
escape the chill blight under which " others," 
and so the panacea of feelings and work for 
others, become infested in our ©wn eyes with 
the paltriness and transience of our own person- 
ality ; while at the same time the spirit of 
courageous wisdom which breathes through 
every page of his book, shows how little 



120 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



ground honest clearness of vision on such 
matters need afford to the usual charges against 
Pessimism. But that he recognizes the rock of 
offence only makes it stranger that he should 
imagine himself to have got round it. All this 
grief and pity at things as they are, and desire 
to have them otherwise, which are such real 
elements in his own mind, have been kept 
in abeyance in the passages where he insists on 
confronting now an "atheistic " convention- 
alism, now a paralyzing Pessimism, with the 
vigor and enthusiasm of worship — taking no 
account of this tertium quid, this grief and pity, 
which is neither of the opposed terms, which 
is entirely remote from the enthusiasm of 
worship, and yet so little paralyzing or con- 
ventional that it may be the very life-blood of 
the enthusiasm of duty. 

An impression is in fact created by particular 
expressions, as well as by the general treatment, 
in the latter part of the book, that the writer s 
eminent sanity has interfered with his keeping 
steadily in view the depth and height of the 
meaning attached by him, in the first part, to 
the chief terms of religious phraseology. Noth- 
ing, for instance, could be more reasonable than 
to include, as a main subject of popular teach- 
ing, the demonstration that " the institutions 
left us from the past are no more diabolical than 
they are divine, being the fruit of necessary de- 



NATURAL RELIGION: 



121 



velopment far more than of free-will or calcu- 
lation." Yet so far as they are matters of 
necessary development, these so-little divine 
institutions are parts of an order so divine that 
in the earlier chapters we have been bidden to 
call it God. Again, when insisting on the rec- 
ognition of that law of Nature which is inde- 
pendent of us, on the acknowledgment that 
" the universe is greater than ourselves, and that 
our wills are weak compared with the law that 
governs it," he says that the lesson " ought not 
to be mastered as a mere depressing negation, 
but rather as a new religion " — with perfect jus- 
tice, if " religion " could mean merely the set of 
conceptions and emotions by which our lives 
may be most wisely adjusted, but surely not 
with justice if it is to retain in its connota- 
tion the habit of enthusiastic contemplation. 
" Great " is a conveniently vague word ; but wor- 
ship is too peculiar and personal a feeling to 
admit among its objects two standards of great- 
ness ; and to worship two masters is harder even 
than to serve them. If we make the attempt 
we find at once that either Nature or Morality 
must be sacrificed ; for by the standard of the 
latter an impersonal and unmoral Universe is 
not " greater than " but less than ourselves. 
And again — strangest instance of all — in the 
very act of recognizing the sense of an unmoral 
Power outside us as one which does and well 



122 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



may strike man with terror and " eternally 
trouble his repose," the author thinks it enough 
to add that the word " religion," in its ordinary 
usage, is not taken to include this aspect, and 
that such feelings belong rather to " supersti- 
tion " ; that is to say, this exponent of the 
" egregious mistake in nomenclature " by which 
" religion " has been wholly diverted from its 
proper meaning, this champion of Religion as 
inclusive of our whole feeling toward Nature, is 
found overleaping the radical objection to his 
own definition on the crutch of that limited and 
perverted usage which it is the aim of his whole 
treatise to supplant. 

The so-called unity, which will survive the 
recognition of the "natural " God as the power 
of corruption, reaction, and barbarism, no less 
than of beauty and progress, may seem the 
stranger for the doubt whether, even on our 
author's own ground, it was necessary. What 
drives him to conceive the divine power, whether 
external or imminent, as nothing less than co- 
extensive with Nature ? Is there no distinction 
between deadness and life ? Is it only in meta- 
phor that Evolution could be described as not 
merely a gradual process but a gradual victory ? 
Is the idea of a divided Nature, and of a divine 
Being working itself clear from stubborn ele- 
ments of grossness and imperfection by a proc- 
ess in which it is for us to share, too absurd 



'"NATURAL RELIGIONS 



I2J 



even to be mentioned ? Perhaps, however, this 
spiritual development could have no interest or 
meaning for those whose spirits are to have no 
continuing share in it, so that any such trans- 
figured Manicheism is excluded from a purely 
mundane religion. The same honest determina- 
tion to keep to the most rigidly mundane con- 
ceptions, to find common religious ground for 
as many persons as possible by " taking the sci- 
entific view frankly at its worst," must further, 
I suppose, be taken to explain the exclusion 
from the argument of all metaphysical along 
with all supernatural views. " At its worst " 
may perhaps be intended to mean " at its least 
philosophical/' as well as " at its least obvi- 
ously religious " ; whence the conspicuous ab- 
sence of any hint that the " what " or " how " 
of Nature has ever been a philosophical ques- 
tion, or that any view of the external world 
other than the crudest realism of " common- 
sense " has ever been put forward. Or is it pos- 
sible that a suspicion inevitably suggested by 
the description of the scientific position in the 
opening chapter of the book, is really well- 
founded ; and that the "philosophy" which 
would transcend the dualism of mind and matter 
is to our author, no less than to the scientist, as 
much an object of scorn as the pseudo-learning 
which he brackets with it, the "erudition "and 
" commentatorship " which create dogmas out 



124 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



of the dicta of the past ? In either case, one 
cannot but remark that resolutely to ignore the 
philosophical stand-point is scarcely the most 
hopeful or legitimate way of lessening the gap 
between the thinkers and the masses, which he 
regards as so ominous a sign of our times. 

And now, to pass to a final topic — one which 
the concluding pages of the book make it im- 
possible to avoid — how do the peculiarities of the 
author's view of Natural Religion affect its re- 
lation, which he so prominently suggests, to 
Supernaturalism ? (I adopt this last unfortu- 
nate and meaningless term, as I suppose he does, 
because common usage supplies no other single 
word for the suggestion of supra-mundane ex- 
istence and hope.) First, then, must not the 
disintegrating effects of that jarring unmoral 
element which has so long distressed us, be 
traced on from the Natural into the Supernat- 
ural Religion ? No scientific mind can imagine 
the transition from the " natural " to the 
" supernatural " as a leap : it is only the self- 
stultifying word " Supernatural" itself, which 
prevents the proverb " natura non habet sal- 
tum " from being as applicable here as any- 
where else. And it would surely be meaning- 
less to deny to the object of our " natural " wor- 
ship — to that which we are to regard here with 
all the sentiments of devotion and faith that we 
can muster— a true kinship and continuation 



' NA TURAL RELIGION." 



125 



with that further something which Is introduced 
expressly to give their fullest scope and satis- 
faction to those very sentiments. Hence a 
teacher like Dr. Martineau, who is quite in agree- 
ment with our author in regarding " Super- 
naturalism " not as the root, but as the crown 
of moral life, can bring in his supernatural re- 
ligion as a thoroughly invigorating and irradiat- 
ing influence, because as a necessary means for 
the further continuance and development of 
the moral nature, and for the satisfaction of un- 
satisfied moral cravings. With such a teacher, 
Supernaturalism is immediately akin to the 
spiritual element in life which at once suggests 
and warrants it ; and includes both the explana- 
tion and the necessary issue of that spiritual 
element. But how different is the case, when 
an unmoral and unspiritual element has been 
included in our " natural" object of worship. 
How can that element be reasonably got rid 
of ? If " Existence " has any continuous relation 
to ourselves, could it be reasonable to regard as 
less than a necessary condition of existence that 
for which, as a condition of our present exist- 
ence, our very widest powers of emotional 
realization have been demanded ? Here, then, 
no special alliance of the spiritual with the 
" supernatural " will be defensible. The gov- 
ernment of the departments of the Universe 
which are beyond our knowledge may just as 



126 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



well be unmoral as that system of " natural 
law " which we know : there will be no reason 
why a future life should imply moral purifica- 
tion ; why satisfaction should ever be given to 
our yearnings for a compensating issue to 
Nature's myriad injustices; or why the vXrj of 
cramping conditions should not be as immortal 
as the spirit which struggles to transcend it. 
On such terms, the intuition of the " super- 
natural " had no business on our author's pages ; 
it perishes before it is conceived ; it is irrele- 
vant to the very needs which are supposed to 
suggest it. 

And lastly, suppose for a moment that he 
would consent to drop the discordant imper- 
sonal element in the "whole" which he pre- 
sents for our worship. Natural Religion would 
then seem divisible into virtuous action, con- 
quests over Nature in certain directions, and a 
healthy exercise of the various bodily and men- 
tal faculties on the one hand ; and on the other, 
manful endurance of the inevitable tedium, 
ugliness, and evil, of which a large part of 
Nature consists. It becomes then most im- 
portant to realize what amount of difference 
will be made by the addition to these elements 
of even a faint intuition of a " supernatural " 
Providence, and of even a bare hope of a future 
life. It is a difference which our author, judged 
by some of his concluding passages, cannot be 



'NATURAL RELIGION:' 



127 



accused of explicitly minimizing; since he 
recognizes as legitimate the doubt whether 
"the known and natural can suffice for human 
life," — a doubt for which, as thus generally ex- 
pressed, might be advantageously substituted 
the precise and scientific statement that for 
some human lives it does and will, and for 
others it does not and will not, suffice ; and he 
practically admits that for many logical minds 
(does it need much reading between the lines to 
add for his own ?) the new element is the phil- 
osopher's stone which turns the dross of life to 
gold. But surely when we look back over the 
treatise from this final point, we cannot fail to 
see that by implication the difference in ques- 
tion has been minimized throughout, and that 
the pervading contradiction of the book has 
been here again exemplified ? How many men 
will find that they can believe or even half- 
believe the one gospel, and throw the whole 
strength of their preaching into the other ? This 
question implies no denial that " religion deals 
in the first instance w 7 ith the known and the nat- 
ural," and no assertion that mundane morality is 
dependent on the survival of Supernaturalism. 
We may go so far as to say that, were there 
men who could find it possible and honest to 
preach one gospel as a supplement to the other, 
those scientists who should treat them as re- 
actionary opponents on a vital point, instead of 



128 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



as the more advanced and sanguine wing of 
their own progressive party, would be guilty of 
very short-sighted and unscientific conduct. But 
the question is just of this possibility; of the 
possibility of a common attitude of enthusiasm 
toward things so different as life with and life 
without the " supernatural " element, toward 
two " Eternals," one of which has for its essence 
the Love and Righteousness which are express- 
ly excluded from the other — whether these 
things can ever to the same man seem so like 
each other, that he can pass from the one to 
the other without any paralyzing fall of tem- 
perature, and regard and preach the mundane 
gospel with the worshipful fervor that our au- 
thor demands of him. To pursue into detail 
the radical difference of attitude which Super- 
naturalism carries into every corner of life, and 
so into every corner of that with which in either 
case the preacher deals, would carry us too 
far : it must suffice to suggest that, as ad- 
dressed to the majority of mankind, the key- 
note of the one gospel is resignation, and of the 
other, hope. 



THE SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS 
OPINIONS. 

By LESLIE STEPHEN 

Mr. FROUDE in his " Life of Carlyle," incident- 
ally sets forth a theory of toleration. Crom- 
well, he tells us, held Romanism to be " morally 
poisonous" ; therefore Cromwell did not toler- 
ate. We have decided that it is no longer 
poisonous ; therefore we do tolerate. Crom- 
well's intolerance implied an intense " hatred of 
evil in its concrete form " ; our tolerance need 
not imply any deficiency in that respect, but 
merely a difference of opinion as to facts. 
Upon this showing, then, we are justified in ex- 
tirpating, by fire and sword, any doctrine if 
only we are sincerely convinced that -it is 
" morally poisonous." I do not take this as a 
full account either of Carlyle's theory, or 
of Mr. Froude's. I quote it merely as a pointed 
statement of a doctrine which in some ways 
would appear to follow more directly from 
the utilitarianism which Carlyle detested. The 
argument is simple. A " poisonous opinion " 
is one which causes a balance of evil. The 
existence of such opinions is admitted. Nor, 

I2Q 



130 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



again, is it denied that under certain conditions 
an opinion may be suppressed by persecution. 
The persecution, then, of a poisonous opinion 
must do some good, and must produce a 
balance of good, if the evil effects of the 
opinion suppressed exceed the various evils due 
to the persecution. But that which causes a 
balance of good is right according to utilita- 
rians ; and therefore persecution may some- 
times be right. If you have to suppress a tri- 
fling error at the cost of much suffering, you are 
acting wrongly, as it would be wrong to cure a 
scratch by cutting off a finger. But it may 
be right to suppress a poisonous opinion when 
the evil of the opinion is measured by the 
corruption of a whole social order, and the evil 
of the persecution by the death, say of twelve 
apostles. In such a case it is expedient, and 
therefore right, that one man or a dozen should 
perish for the good of the people. 

Mill attacked the applicability, though not 
the first principle, of this reasoning in the most 
forcible part of his " Liberty." He argues in sub- 
stance that the collateral evils due to persecu- 
tion are always, or almost always, excessive. 
He could not, as a utilitarian, deduce toleration 
from some absolute a priori principle. But by 
pointing out evil consequences generally over- 
looked, he could strengthen the general pre- 
sumption against its utility in any particular 



^(JPPPESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 131 



case. His utilitarian opponents may still dis- 
pute the sufficiency of his reasoning. They 
urge, in substance, that the presumption is not 
strong enough to justify an absolute rule. 
Granting that there is a presumption against 
persecution generally, and that all the evils 
pointed out by Mills should be taken into 
account, yet, they say, it is still a question of 
expediency. We must be guided in each 
particular case by a careful balance of the good 
and evil, and must admit this general presump- 
tion only for what it is worth ; as a guiding 
rule in doubtful cases, or where we do not 
know enough to balance consequences satis- 
factorily, but not as possessing sufficient 
authority to override a clear conclusion in the 
opposite sense. Practically, we may assume, 
the difference comes to very little. Mill's 
opponents might often be as tolerant as him- 
self. He says, indeed, that toleration is the 
universal rule ; yet even he might admit that, 
as in other moral problems, a casuist might de- 
vise circumstances under which it would cease 
to be absolute. On the other hand, his 
opponents, though holding in theory that each 
case has to be judged on its merits, would, in 
fact, agree that no case ever occurs at the 
present time in which the balance is not in 
favor of toleration. The discussion, therefore, 
has less practical application than one might at 



132 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



first sight suppose. One man says : " Tolera- 
tion is always rights but at times this, like other 
moral rules, may be suspended. " The other: "It 
is not a question of right or wrong, but of ex- 
pediency; but, on the other hand, in almost 
every conceivable case, toleration is clearly 
expedient/' It is only, therefore, as illustrat- 
ing an interesting ethical problem — interesting, 
that is, to people capable of feeling an interest 
in such gratuitous logic-chopping — that I 
would consider the- problem. 

I remark, therefore, in the first place, that 
one argument of considerable importance 
scarcely receives sufficient emphasis from Mill. 
The objection taken by the ordinary common- 
sense of mankind to persecution is very often 
that the doctrines expressed are false. Tolera- 
tion, beyond all doubt, has been advanced by 
scepticism. It is clearly both inexpedient and 
wrong to burn people for not professing belief 
in mischievous lies or even in harmless errors. 
Mill extends the argument to cases where 
power and truth are on the same side ; but he 
scarcely brings out what may be called the 
specifically moral objection. I may hold 
that Romanism is false and even " poisonous.' ' 
I may still admit that a sincere Romanist is 
not only justified in believing — for, so far as his 
belief is logical, he cannot help believing — but 
also that he is morally bound to avow his belief. 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. I 33 



He is in the position of a man who is sincerely 
convinced that a food which I hold to be 
poisonous is wholesome, or, rather, an indis- 
pensable medicine. If he thinks so, it is clearly 
his duty to let his opinion be known. A man 
holds that prussic add will cure when it really 
kills. He is mistaken, but surely he is bound 
to impart so important a truth to his fellows. 
So long, indeed, as men held that it was 
not only foolish but wicked to hold other 
religious opinions than their own, this argu- 
ment did not apply. But I need not argue 
that sincere errors are in themselves innocent. 
The most virtuous of men will be a Calvinist 
in Scotland, a Catholic in Spain, and a Moham- 
medan in Turkey. And so far as this possibil- 
ity is admitted, and as the contrary conviction 
spreads — namely, that the leaders of heresies 
are generally virtuous, because it requires virtue 
to uphold an unpopular opinion, — the dilemma 
becomes pressing. The persecutor, as a rule, is 
punishing the virtuous for virtuous conduct, and, 
moreover, for conduct which he admits to be vir- 
tuous. For this is not one of those cases with 
which casuists sometimes puzzle themselves. 
The fact that a man thinks himself acting rightly, 
or is wicked on principle, is not a sufficient de- 
fence against legal punishment. If a man is a 
Thug, the government is not the less bound to 
hang him because he thinks murder right. A 



134 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



thief must be punished, though he objects to 
property in general ; and a man who deserts his 
wife, though he disapproves of marriage. A 
man is in such cases punished for an action 
which the ruler holds to be immoral. But the 
persecutor has to punish a man precisely for 
discharging a duty admitted even by the 
persecutor to be a duty, and a duty of the 
highest obligation. If the duty of truthfulness 
be admitted, I am bound not to express be- 
lief in a creed which I hold to be false. If 
benevolence be a duty, I am bound to tell 
my neighbor how he can avoid hell-fire. The 
dilemma thus brought about — the necessity of 
crushing conscience by law — will be admitted 
to be an evil, though it may be an inevitable 
evil. The social tie carries with it the necessity 
of sometimes forcing particular people to do 
that which both they and we admit to be 
wrong. But the scandal so caused is one main 
cause of the abhorrence felt for the persecutor, 
and the sympathy for his victims. The 
ordinary statement of the impolicy of making 
men martyrs testifies to the general force of the 
impression. And it must, in fact, be taken 
into account upon any method of calculation, 
in so far, at least, as the revulsion of feeling 
excited by persecution tells against the efficacy 
of the method adopted. The persecutor, that 
is, must clearly remember that by burning a 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 135 



man for his honesty, he is inevitably exciting 
the disgust of all who care for honesty, even 
though they do not prize it more than ortho- 
doxy. It must be in all cases a great, even if 
a necessary, evil, that the law should outrage 
the conscience of its subjects. And whatever 
conclusion may be reached, it is desirable to 
consider how far and on what principles the 
acceptance of this dilemma can be regarded 
as unavoidable. 

The utilitarian can, of course, give a con- 
sistent reply. The ultimate criterion, he says, 
of virtue is utility. Sincerity is a virtue 
because it is obviously useful to mankind. 
That men should be able to trust each other is 
a first condition of the mutual assistance 
upon which happiness depends. But here is a 
case in which we — that is, the rulers — are con- 
vinced that sincerity does harm. We shall be 
illogical if we allow the general rule derived 
from particular cases to govern us in the case 
where it plainly does noc apply. We admit 
all the evils alleged ; the suffering of a sincere 
man because of his sincerity, the encourage- 
ment to hypocrisy, the demoralization of those 
whose lips are closed ; but, after admitting all 
this, we still see so clearly the mischief which 
will follow from the. spread of the opinions we 
question, that we pronounce it to exceed all 
the otfrer admitted mischief, and are therefore 



136 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



still bound to persecute. Turn it and twist it 
as you will, the question still comes to this : 
Which way does the balance of happiness in- 
cline ? Is it better that virtuous Romanists 
should go to the stake and Romanism be so 
stamped out, or that so poisonous an opinion 
be allowed to spread ? We fully admit all the 
evils which you have noted, and willingly put 
them in the balance ; but we must weigh 
them against the evils which follow from the 
toleration, and our action must be determined 
by a final comparison. 

Undoubtedly the argument has great appar- 
ent strength. It fixes the issues which are 
generally taken ; and when helped by the 
assumption that belief in a creed may deter- 
mine a man's happiness for all eternity, and 
that men or some body of men may possess in- 
fallibility, it makes a very imposing show. 
Nor do I wish to dispute the fundamental 
principle ; that is, the principle that utility 
is in some sense to be the final criterion of 
morality. I think, however, that here, as in 
other cases, a thoroughgoing application of 
that criterion will lead us to a different conclu- 
sion from that which results from a first inspec- 
tion. And, in order to show this, I must try 
to point out certain tacit assumptions made in 
the application of this principle to the facts. 
Granting that we must test persecution by its 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. I 37 



effects upon human happiness, I must add that 
we cannot fairly measure these effects without 
looking a little more closely into the conditions 
under which they are necessarily applied. The 
argument starts from the generalization of 
something like a truism. The alleged fact is 
simply this, that pain, threatened or inflicted, 
will stop a man's mouth. It can hardly convert 
him, but it will prevent him from converting 
others. I do not dispute the statement ; I feel, 
for my part, that, so far as I am able to form an 
opinion as to my own conduct, there is no 
creed which I would not avow or renounce 
rather than be burnt alive. I think that I 
might probably prefer distant damnation to 
immediate martyrdom. Many men, happily 
for the race, have been more heroic ; but burn- 
ing stopped even their mouths, and so far sup- 
pressed their influence. We have, however, to 
modify this statement before we can apply it to 
any serious purpose. We have to show, that 
is, that we not only suppress the individual but 
eradicate the opinion from society; and this 
raises two questions. There is a difficulty in 
catching the opinion which is to be suppressed, 
and there is a difficulty about arranging the 
machinery through which the necessary force 
is to be supplied. When we examine the con- 
ditions of the success in the enterprise, it may 
turn out that it is impossible in many cases, 



138 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



and possible in any case only at the cost of 
evils which would more than counterbalance 
any possible benefit. Only by such an investi- 
gation can we really measure the total effect of 
persecution, and it will, I think, appear to 
be still more far-reaching and disastrous than 
is implied even by Mill's cogent reasoning. 

Mill, in fact, conducts the argument as 
though he made an assumption (for I will not 
say that he actually made it) which appears to 
me at least to be curiously unreal. His reason- 
ing would be sometimes more to the purpose if 
we could suppose an opinion to be a sort of 
definite object, a tangible thing, like the germ 
of a disease, existing in a particular mind, as 
the germ in a particular body, and therefore 
capable of being laid hold of and suppressed by 
burning the person to whom it belongs, as the 
germ is suppressed by being dipped in boiling 
water. This corresponds to what one may call 
the " happy thought " doctrine of scientific dis- 
covery. Popular writers used sometimes to tell 
the story of Newton's great discovery as though 
Newton one day saw an apple fall, and ex- 
claimed, "Ah! an apple is a kind of moon!" 
This remark had occurred to no one else, and 
might never have struck anybody again. If, 
therefore, you had caught Newton on the spot 
and stamped him out, the discovery of gravita- 
tion might have been permanently suppressed. 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS, 1 39 



Mill would, of course, have perceived the ab- 
surdity of such a statement as clearly as any 
one ; yet he seems to make a very similar as- 
sumption in his " Liberty." It is, he is arguing, 
a "piece of idle sentimentality" that truth 
has any intrinsic power of prevailing against 
persecution. " The real advantage which truth 
has consists in this, that when an opinion is 
true it may be extinguished once, twice, or 
many times, but in the course of ages there will 
generally be found persons to rediscover it 
and when, he adds, it is rediscovered in a pro- 
pitious age, it may "make such head" as to 
resist later attempts at suppression. Surely 
this is a most inadequate account of the 
strength of truth. The advantage dependent 
upon a chance of rediscovery is equally pos- 
sessed by error; old superstitions are just as 
much given to reappearance as old truths. 
Every one who has examined stupid lads 
knows very well that the blunders which they 
make are just as uniform as the truths which 
they perceive. Given minds at a certain stage, 
and exposed to certain external conditions, we 
can predict the illusions which will be gen- 
erated. So, to quote the familiar instances: 
the mass of mankind still believes that the sun 
goes round the earth, and is convinced that a 
moving body will stop of itself, independently 
of external resistance. The advantage of truth 



140 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



is surely put in the other fact, that it can, as 
Mill says, "make head." It gathers strength 
by existing ; it gathers strength, that is, because 
it can be verified and tested, and every fresh 
test confirms the belief ; and it gathers strength 
again in so far as it becomes part of a general 
system of truths, each of which confirms, eluci- 
dates, and corroborates the others, and which 
together form the organized mass of accepted 
knowledge which we call science. So far as we 
are possessed of any thing that can be called 
scientific knowledge, we have not to deal with 
a list of separate assertions, each of which has to 
be judged upon its own merits, and each of which 
may stand or fall independently of all the others ; 
but with a system of interdependent truths, some 
of which are supported by irresistible weight of 
evidence, whilst the remainder are so inextrica- 
bly intertwined with the central core of truth 
that they cannot be separately rejected. To 
talk, therefore, of suppressing an opinion as if it 
were not part of a single growth, but a separa- 
ble item in a chaotic aggregate of distinguisha- 
ble theories, is to overlook the most essential 
condition of bringing any influence to bear 
upon opinion generally. 

Consider, first, the case of any scientific 
theory. Newton's great achievement was sup- 
posed to lead to questionable theological infer- 
ences ; as, indeed, whatever may be the logical 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OP J N IONS. 141 



inferences, there can be no doubt that it was 
fatal to the mythological imagery in which the 
earth appeared as the centre of the universe. 
Suppose, then, that it had been decided that 
the opinion was poisonous, and that anybody 
who maintained that the earth went round the 
sun should be burnt ! Had such a system been 
carried out, what must have happened ? If we 
suppose it to be compatible with the continued 
progress of astronomical and physical inquiries, 
this particular conclusion might still be ostensi- 
bly conceded. Kepler's discoveries, and all the 
astronomical observations assumed by Newton, 
might have been allowed to be promulgated, as 
affording convenient means of calculation, and 
Newton's physical theories might have been let 
pass as interesting surmises in speculation, or 
admitted as applicable to other cases. It might 
still be asserted that, so far as the solar # system 
was concerned, the doctrines possessed no " ob- 
jective truth." Something of the kind was, I 
believe, actually attempted ; it needs, however, 
no argument to show that such a persecution 
would be childish, and would be virtually giving 
over the key of the position to the antagonist 
with some feeble ostensible stipulation that he 
should not openly occupy one dependent out- 
work. The truth would not have been sup- 
pressed, but the open avowal of the truth. 
The only other alternative would have been to 



142 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



suppress physical theories and astronomical ob- 
servation altogether, in order to avoid the 
deduction of the offensive corollary. In such 
a case, then, the only choice, by the very nature 
of the case, is not between permitting or sup- 
pressing "an opinion/' but between permitting 
or suppressing scientific inquiry in general. 
There are, no doubt, bigots and stupid people 
enough to be ready to suppress speculation at 
large ; but they would find it hard to induce 
people to suppress things of obvious utility; 
they cannot suppress the study of astronomy 
for purposes of navigation, and yet when 
the truth has been acquired for this end its 
application to others follows by a spontaneous 
and irresistible process. The victory is won, 
and the only question is whether the conqueror 
shall march in openly or in a mask. 

This familiar example may illustrate the ex- 
treme difficulty of catching, isolating, and sup- 
pressing so subtle an essence as an opinion. 
Stop all thought, and of course you can anni- 
hilate the particular doctrine which it generates. 
But the price to pay is a heavy one, and clearly . 
not to be measured by the particular sets of 
consequences which result from the specified 
dogma. The same principle is everywhere 
operative. The greatest shock lately received 
by the conservative theologians has been due 
to the spread of Darwinian theories ! How, 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. H3 



granting that rulers and priests had at their 
disposal any amount of persecuting power, 
would they have proposed to suppress those 
theories ? They object to the belief that men 
have grown out of monkeys. Would they, 
then, allow men to hold that the horse and ass 
have a common ancestor? or to question the 
permanency of genera and species of plants? 
Would they prohibit Mr. Darwin's investiga- 
tions into the various breeds of pigeons, or 
object to his exposition of the way in which a 
multiplication of cats might be unfavorable to 
the fertilization of clover ? The principle 
shows itself in the most trifling cases ; once 
established there, it spreads by inevitable con- 
tagion to others ; the conclusion is obvious to 
all men, whether tacitly insinuated or openly 
drawn. To suppress it you must get rid of the 
primitive germ. When once it has begun to 
spread, no political nets or traps can catch so 
subtle an element. It would be - as idle to 
attempt to guard against it, as to say that 
small-pox may rage as it pleases everywhere 
else, but you will keep it out of Pall Mall by a 
cordon of policemen to stop people with an 
actual eruption. The philosophy of a people is 
the central core of thought, which is affected 
by every change taking place on the remotest 
confines of the organism. It is sensitive to 
every change in every department of inquiry. 



144 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



Every new principle discovered anywhere has 
to find its place in the central truths ; and 
unless you are prepared to superintend and 
therefore to stifle thought in general, you may 
as well let it alone altogether. Superintendence 
means stifling. That is not the less true, even 
if the doctrine suppressed be erroneous. As- 
suming that Darwinianism is wrong, or as far 
as you please from being absolutely true, yet 
its spread proves conclusively that it represents 
a necessary stage of progress. We may have 
to pass beyond it ; but in any case we have to 
pass through it. It represents that attitude of 
mind and method of combining observations 
which is required under existing conditions. 
It may enable us to rise to a point from which 
we shall see its inadequacy. But even its an- 
tagonists admit the necessity of working pro- 
visionally, at least, from this assumption, and 
seeing what can be made of it ; and would 
admit, therefore, that a forcible suppression, if 
so wild an hypothesis can be entertained, would 
be equivalent to the suppression not of this or 
that theory, but of thought. 

The conclusion is, briefly, that, so far as 
scientific opinion is concerned, you have to 
choose between tolerating error and suppress- 
ing all intellectual activity. If this be admitted 
in the case of what we call " scientific " knowl- 
edge, the dilemma presents itself everywhere. 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 45 



We are becoming daily more fully aware of the 
unity of knowledge ; of the impossibility of 
preserving, isolating, and impounding particular 
bits of truth, or protecting orthodoxy by the 
most elaborate quarantine. It is idle to speak 
of a separation between the spheres of science 
and theology, as though the contents of the 
two were entirely separate. There is, doubt- 
less, much misconception as to the nature of 
the relation ; false inferences are frequently 
made by hasty thinkers; but the difference,, 
whatever it may be, is not such as divides two 
independent series of observations, but such 
that every important change in one region has 
a necessary and immediate reaction on the 
other. If we accept the principle of evolution 
— whether we take the Darwinian version or 
any other as our guide — as applied to the his- 
tory of human belief, we more and more realize 
the undeniable facts that the history must be 
considered as a whole ; that the evolution, how- 
ever it takes place, has to follow certain lines 
defined by the successive stage of intellectual 
development ; that it consists of a series of 
gradual approximations, each involving positive 
errors, or at least provisional assumptions ac- 
cepted for the moment as definite truths ; and 
that every widely spread belief, whether accu- 
rate or erroneous, has its place in the process, 
as representing at least the illusions which 



146 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



necessarily present themselves to minds at a 
given point of the ascending scale. The whole 
process may be, and, of course, frequently has 
been, arrested. But, if it is to take place at all, 
it is impossible to proscribe particular conclu- 
sions beforehand. The conclusions forbidden 
may, of course, be such as would never have 
been reached, even if not forbidden. In that 
case the persecution would be useless. But, if 
they are such as would commend themselves to 
masses of men but for the prohibition, it follows 
that they are necessary " moments " in the evo- 
lutions of thought, and therefore can only be 
suppressed by suppressing that evolution. 

The vagueness of the argument stated in 
these general terms is no bar to its value in 
considering more special cases. It suggests, in 
the first place, an extension of one of Mill's 
arguments which has been most frequently 
criticised. He tries to prove this advantage of 
persecution by a rather exaggerated estimate of 
the value of contradiction. " Even admitted 
truths/' he says, " are apt to lose there interest 
for us unless stimulated by collision with the 
contradictory error." It is, of course, obvious 
to reply that we believe in Euclid or in the 
ordinary principles of conduct, though nobody 
ever denies that two sides of a triangle are 
greater than the third, or doubts that water 
quenches thirst. An opinion, I should say, 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 47 



gains vividness rather from constant application 
to conduct than from habitual opposition. 
But, so far as Mill's argument has to do with 
toleration ; it seems to be cogent, and to derive 
its strength from the principle I am defending. 
Many opinions, if ever entertained, would 
doubtless die out by inherent weakness. It 
would be idle to punish men for maintaining 
that two and two make five, because the 
opinion would never survive a practical applica- 
tion. The prohibition of a palpably absurd 
theory would be a waste of force, and might 
possibly suggest to a few eccentric people that 
there must, after all, be something to say for 
the absurdity, and therefore, if for no other 
reason, it is undesirable. But it was, of course, 
not of such opinions that Mill was thinking. 
The only opinions which any one would 
seriously desire to frustrate are plausible opin- 
ions ; opinions, that is, which would flourish 
but for persecution, and every persecutor justi- 
fies himself by showing, to his own satisfaction, 
that his intervention is needed. He rejects the 
argument by which Gamaliel defended the first 
plea for toleration. He holds that opinions, 
though coming from God, require human de- 
fence. He thinks that even the devil's creed 
would flourish but for the stake, and this as- 
sumption is the sole justification of the stake. 
That is to say, persecution is always defended, 



148 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



and can only be defended, on the ground that 
the persecuted opinion is highly plausible, and 
the same plausibility of an opinion is a strong 
presumption that it is an essential part of the 
whole evolution. Even if it be wrong, it must 
represent the way in which a large number of 
people will think, if they think at all. It corre- 
sponds to one aspect, though an incomplete 
or illusory aspect, of the facts. If there be no 
reason there must be some general cause of the 
error ; a cause which, in the supposed case, 
must be the prevalence of some erroneous or 
imperfect belief in the minds of many people. 
The predisposing cause will presumably remain 
even if this expression of opinion be silenced. 
And, in all such cases, the effect of suppression 
will be prejudicial to the vigor even of the true 
belief. The causes, whatever they be, which 
obstruct its acceptance, will operate in a covert 
form. Real examination becomes impossible 
when the side which is not convicted is not 
allowed to have its reasons for doubt tested ; 
and we reach the dilemma just stated. That is 
to say, if thought is not suppressed, the error 
will find its way to the surface through some 
subterranean channels ; whilst, if thought is 
suppressed, the truth and all speculative truth 
will of course be enfeebled with the general 
enfeeblement of the intellect. To remedy a 
morbid growth, you have applied a ligature 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. I49 



which can only succeed by arresting circulation 
and bringing on the mortification of the limb. 
To treat intellectual error in this fashion must 
always be to fall into the practice of quackery, 
and suppress a symptom instead of attacking 
the source of the evil. 

The assertion is, apparently at least, opposed 
to another doctrine in which Mill agrees with 
some of his antagonists. He says, as we have 
seen, that a belief in the natural prevalence of 
truth is a piece of idle sentimentality ; it is a 
" pleasant falsehood " to say that truth always 
triumphs ; " history teems with instances of 
successful persecution and he confirms this 
by such cases as the failure of the Reformers m 
Spain, Italy, and Flanders, and of the various 
attempts which preceded Luther's successful 
revolt. Arguments beginning " all history 
shows " are, I will venture to say, always 
sophistical. The most superficial knowledge is 
sufficient to show that, in this case at least, the 
conclusion is not demonstrated. To prove that 
persecution " succeeded " in suppressing truth, 
you must prove that without persecution truth 
would have prevailed. The argument from 
the Reformation must surely in Mill be an 
argumentum ad haminem. He did not hold 
that Luther or Knox or the Lollards preached 
the whole truth ; hardly, even, that they were 
nearer the truth than Ignatius or St. Bernard. 



ISO Q UESTIONS OF BELIEF. 

And the point is important. For when it is 
said that the Reformation was suppressed in 
Italy and Spain by persecution, we ask at once 
whether there is the slightest reason to suppose 
that, if those countries had been as free as 
England at the present day, they would have 
become Protestant ? Protestantism had its day 
of vitality, and in some places it is still vigor- 
ous ; but with all the liberty of conscience of 
modern Italy, the most enthusiastic Protestant 
scarcely expects its conversion before the mil- 
lennium. If, when there is a fair field and no 
favor, Protestantism stands still, why should we 
suppose that it would once have advanced ? 
Macaulay, in a famous article, insisted upon 
the singular arrest of the Protestant impulse. 
The boundaries between Protestantism are still 
drawn upon the lines fixed by the first great 
convulsion. It is at least as plausible to 
attribute this to the internal decay of Protes- 
tantism as to the external barriers raised by 
persecution. In the seventeenth century phil- 
osophical intellects had already passed beyond 
the temporary compromise which satisfied 
Luther and his contemporaries. Protestantism, 
so far as it meant a speculative movement, was 
not the name of a single principle or a coherent 
system of opinion, but of a mass of inconsistent 
theories approximating more or less consciously 
to pure deism or " naturalism/' Victories over 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. I 5 I 



Romanism were not really won by the creed of 
Calvin and Knox, but by the doctrines of 
Hobbes and Spinoza. Otherwise, we may well 
believe the Protestant creed would have spread 
more rapidly instead of ceasing to spread at all 
precisely when persecution became less vigorous. 
When we look more closely at the facts, the 
assumption really made shows its true nature. 
Persecution might strike down any nascent 
Protestantism in Spain ; but it can hardly be 
said that it created the very zeal which it mani- 
fested. If no persecution had been possible, 
the enthusiasm of Loyola and his • successors 
might (even if I may not say, would) have 
burned all the more brightly. And if the ortho- 
dox had been forbidden to strike a foul blow, 
they might have been equally successful when 
confined to legitimate methods. The reason- 
ing, in fact, is simple. Protestantism died out 
when persecution flourished. But persecution 
flourished when zeal was intense. It is impos- 
sible, then, to argue that the extinction of 
heresy was due to the special fact of the perse- 
cution in order to account for the fact that it 
did not spread in the regions where faith was 
strongest. In any case, if we assume, as we 
must assume, that the old faith was congenial 
to a vast number of minds, we might be sure 
that it would triumph where it had the most 
numerous and zealous followers. Under the 



152 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



conditions of the times, that triumph, of course, 
implied persecution ; but it is an inversion of 
all logic to put this collateral effect as the cause 
of the very state of mind which alone could 
make it possible. So, again, Protestantism 
died out in France (which Mill does not men- 
tion) and survived in England ; and in England, 
says Mill, the death of Elizabeth or the life of 
Mary would " most likely" have caused its 
extirpation. Possibly, for it is difficult to 
argue " might have beens." But it is equally 
possible that the English indifference which 
made the country pliable in the hands of its 
rulers would have prevented any effective per- 
secution, and the ineffectual persecution have 
led only to a more thorough-going revolution 
when the Puritan party had accumulated a 
greater stock of grievances. If, again, Protes- 
tantism had been really congenial to the French 
people, is it not at least probable that it would 
have gathered sufficient strength in the seven- 
teenth century — whatever the disadvantages 
under which it actually labored — to make a 
subsequent revival of vigorous persecution im- 
possible ? The ultimate condition of success 
lay, partly at any rate, in the complex condi- 
tions, other than the direct action of rulers, 
which predisposed one society to the Catholic 
and others to the Protestant doctrine ; and if 
we are not entitled to assume that this was the 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. I 53 



ultimate and determining condition of the final 
division, we are certainly not entitled to seek 
for it in the persecution which is, in any land, a 
product of a spiritual force capable of acting in 
countless other ways. 

Once more we come across that " happy 
thought " doctrine which was natural to the old 
method of writing history. Catholics were once 
content to trace the English Reformation to 
the wickedness of Henry the Eighth or Eliza- 
beth ; Protestants to the sudden inspiration of 
this or that reformer. Without attempting to 
argue the general question of the importance of 
great religious leaders, this at least is evident, 
that the appropriate medium is as necessary as 
the immediate stimulus. There were bad men 
before Henry the Eighth, and daring thinkers 
and reformers before Luther. The Church 
could resist plunder or reform whilst it pos- 
sessed sufficient vital force ; and the ultimate 
condition of that force was that its creeds and 
its worship satisfied the strongest religious aspi- 
rations of mankind. Luther himself at an ear- 
lier period would have been a St. Bernard. Its 
weakness and the success of assailants, good or 
bad, were due, as no one will now deny, to the 
morbid condition into which it had fallen, from 
causes which could only be fully set forth by 
the profoundest and most painstaking investiga- 
tion. If this be granted, it follows that Prot- 



154 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



estantism, whether a wholesome or a pernicious 
movement, meant the operation of certain 
widely spread and deeply seated causes render- 
ing some catastrophe inevitable. To apply an 
effective remedy it would have been necessary 
to remove the causes, to restore the old institu- 
tions in working order, and to renew the vitality 
of the faiths upon which its vigor essentially 
depended. So far as the opponents of reform 
relied upon persecution they were driving the 
disease inward instead of applying an effectual 
remedy. Such observations — too commonplace 
to be worth more than a brief indication — must 
be indicated in order to justify the obvious lim- 
itations to Mill's estimate of the efficacy of per- 
secution. In the first place, it is not proved 
that it was properly " efficacious " at all ; that 
is, that the limits of the creeds would not have 
been approximately the same had no persecu- 
tion been allowed. Secondly, if efficacious, it 
was efficacious at a cost at which the immediate 
suffering of the martyrs is an absurdly inade- 
quate measure. In Spain, Protestantism was 
stamped out when it might have died a natu- 
ral death, at the price of general intellectual 
atrophy. Had the persecutors known that the 
system from which persecution resulted was 
also a system under which their country would 
decline from the highest to the most insignifi- 
cant position, their zeal might have been cooled. 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS, 155 



In France, again, if Protestantism was sup- 
pressed by the State, Catholics of to-day may 
reckon the cost. Thought, being (upon that 
hypothesis) forced into a different mode of ex- 
pressing dissent, has not only brought about 
the triumph of unbelief, but the production of 
a type of infidelity not only speculatively hos- 
tile to Catholicism, but animated by a bitter 
hatred which even the most anti-Catholic of 
reasoners may regret. I am unable to decide 
the problem whether it is worth while to save a 
few souls at the moment with the result of ulti- 
mately driving a whole nation to perdition ; 
but it is one which even those who rely upon 
the hell-fire argument may consider worth no- 
tice. And if, in England, we have escaped 
some of these mischiefs, we may ask how much 
good we have done by an ineffectual persecution 
of Catholics in Ireland — a point upon which it 
is needless to insist, because every one admits 
the folly of ineffectual persecution. 

The facts so considered seem to fit best with 
the doctriue which I am advocating. Persecu- 
tion may be effective at the cost of strangling 
all intellectual advance ; it may be successful 
for a time in enforcing hypocrisy, or, in other 
words, taking the surest means of producing a 
dry-rot of the system defended ; or, finally, it 
may be ineffectual in securing its avowed ob- 
ject, but singularly efficacious in producing 



156 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



bitter antipathy and accumulating undying ill- 
will between hostile sections of society. When, 
therefore, the argument is stated as though all 
the evils to be put in the balance against per- 
secution were the pain of the immediate suffer- 
ers and the terror of sympathizers, I should say 
that the merest outside of the case has really 
been touched. One other consideration is 
enough for this part of the question. Persecu- 
tion may discourage unbelief ; but it cannot be 
maintained that it has the least direct tendency 
to increase belief. Positively it must fail, what- 
ever it may do negatively. The decay of a 
religion means a decline of " vital faith " — of a 
vivid realization of the formulae verbally ac- 
cepted. That is the true danger in the eyes of 
believers ; and, if it be widely spread, no burn- 
ing of heretics can tencl to diminish it. People 
do not believe more vigorously because believers 
in a different creed are burned. They only be- 
come more cowardly in all their opinions ; and 
some other remedy of a totally different nature 
can alone be efficacious. You can prevent peo- 
ple from worshipping another God, but you can- 
not make them more zealous about their own. 
And perhaps a lukewarm believer is more likely 
to be damned, certainly he is not less likely to 
be mischievous, than a vigorous heretic. 

To complete the argument, however, or rather 
the outline of the argument, it would be neces- 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. l$7 



sary to follow out another set of considerations. 
Granting that you can suppress your heresy by 
persecution enough, we have to ask how you 
can get persecution enough. Persecution which 
does not suppress is a folly as well as a crime. 
To irritate without injuring is mischievous upon 
all hypotheses. In that case if not in others, 
even cynics allow that the blood of the martyrs 
is the seed of the Church. The danger of ad- 
vertising your opponent is pretty well under- 
stood by this time ; and popular riots, or a 
pretty bit of municipal despotism, is the very 
thing desirable for the Salvation Army. It is 
agreed, then, that the weapon is one to be used 
solely on condition that it is applied with suffi- 
cient stringency. Now, if we ask further how 
this is to be obtained, and especially if we ask 
that question in the light of the preceding in- 
quiry, we shall arrive at a conclusion difficult 
to state in adequate terms. It may be possible 
to stamp out what we may call a particular 
opinion. The experiment at least has often 
been tried, though I do not know that it has 
often succeeded. When it was criminal to 
speak of a king's vices, the opinion entertained 
about particular kings was hardly more flatter- 
ing, though flatterers alone could speak openly, 
than it is now. But to suppress so vague and 
penetrating a thing as a new religious opinion 
is a very different and a very serious matter. 



158 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



The change may* not be the less efficacious be- 
cause it is not overt. Nothing, for example, 
could be easier than to advocate, the most infi- 
del opinions in the language of perfect ortho- 
doxy. The belief in God is generally taken to 
be a cardinal article of faith. But the words 
may be made to cover any state of mind. 
Spinoza and Hobbes both professed to believe 
in a God who, to their opponents, is no God at 
all. The quaint identification of " deist " with 
" atheist/' by orthodox writers, is an illustration 
of the possible divergence of meaning under 
unity of phrase. One set of theologians hold 
to the conception of a Being who will help a 
pious leader to win a battle if a proper request 
be made. Another set, equally sincere and de- 
vout, regard any such doctrine as presumptuous 
and profane. Briefly, what is common to all 
who use the word, is a substance known only 
by attributes which are susceptible of indefinite 
variation. And what is true of this is true of 
all articles of faith. I will be a believer in any 
theological dogma to-morrow, if you will agree 
that I shall define the words precisely as I 
please ; nor do I think that I should often have 
to strain them beyond very respectable prece- 
dents in order to cover downright positivism. 
How is this difficulty to be met ? how is a nom- 
inal belief in Christianity to be guarded from 
melting away without any change of phraseology 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 159 



into some vague pantheism or agnosticism, or, 
in the other direction, to a degrading anthropo- 
morphism ? A mere chain of words is too 
easily borne to be cared for by anybody. You 
may crush a downright Tom Paine ; but how 
are you to restrain your wily latitudinarian, who 
will swallow any formula as if he liked it ? Ob- 
viously, the only reply can be that you must 
give discretionary powers to your Inquisition. 
It must be empowered to judge of tendencies 
as well as of definite opinions ; to cross-examine 
the freethinker, and bring his heresy to open 
light ; to fashion new tests when the old ones 
break down, and to resist the very first ap- 
proaches of the insidious enemy who would 
rationalize and extenuate. And, further, as I 
have said, the same authority must lay his 
grasp, not only on theologians and philosophers, 
but upon every department of thought by which 
they are influenced ; that is to say, upon spec- 
ulation in general. Without this the substance 
may all slip away, and leave you with nothing 
but an empty shell of merely formal assertion. 
The task is of course practicable in proportion 
to the rarity of intellectual activity. In ages 
when speculation was only possible for a rare 
philosopher here and there, it might be easy to 
make the place too hot to hold him, even if he 
escaped open collision with authority. But in 
any social state approaching at all to the pres- 



i6o 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



ent, the magnitude of the task is obvious beyond 
all need of explanation. 

This suggests a final conclusion. No serious 
politician assumes off-hand that a law will exe- 
cute itself. It may be true that drunkenness 
and heresy would expire together if every 
drunkard and heretic could be hanged. But 
before proposing a law founded upon that opin- 
ion, the legislator has to ask, not only whether 
it would be effective if applied, but whether it 
could be applied. What are the conditions of 
efficiency of law itself ? Opponents of tolera- 
tion seem to pass over this as irrelevant. If 
heretics were bearable, heresy would die out. 
Suppose that granted, how does it apply ? The 
question as to the possibility of carrying out a 
law is as important as any other question about 
it. The Legislature is omnipotent in the sense 
that whatever it declares to be a law is a law ; 
for that is the meaning of a law ; but it is as far 
as possible from omnipotence in the sense of 
being able to impose any rule in practice. For 
any thing to be effective persecution, you re- 
quire your Inquisition — a body endowed with 
such authority as to be able not merely to pro- 
scribe a given dogma, but all the various dis- 
guises which it may assume ; and to suppress 
the very germs of the doctrines by which the 
whole of a creed may be sapped without osten- 
sible assaults upon its specific statements ; to 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. l6l 



silence, not only the conscious heretic, but the 
most dangerous reasoner who is unintentionally 
furthering heretical opinions ; to extend its do- 
minion over the whole field of intellectual activ- 
ity, and so stamp out, not this or that objec- 
tionable statement, but to arrest those changes 
in the very constituent principles of reasoning, 
which, if they occur, bring with them the ne- 
cessity of correlative changes in particular opin- 
ions, and which can only be hindered from 
occurring by arresting the development of 
thought itself. When faith in the supernatural 
is decaying, it is idle to enforce internal homage 
to this or that idol. The special symptom is 
the result of a constitutional change which such 
measures have no tendency to remedy. How, 
then, is an administrative machinery equal to 
such purposes to be contrived, or the necessary 
force supplied for its effective working? Obvi- 
ously it implies such an all-embracing and pen- 
etrating despotism as can hardly be paralleled 
in history ; a blind spirit of loyalty which will 
accept and carry out the decisions of the polit- 
ical rulers, and that in the face of the various 
influences which, by the hypothesis, are bring- 
ing about an intellectual change, and presuma- 
bly affecting the rulers as well as their subjects. 
And even so much can only be reached by lim- 
iting or asphyxiating the intellectual progress, 
with all which it implies. The argument, it 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



must be added, applies to the case of erroneous, 
as well as of sound, opinions. That is to say, it 
is in all cases idle to attack the error unless you 
can remove the predisposing cause. I may 
hold, in fact I do hold, that what is called the 
religious reaction of recent times involves the 
growth of many fallacies, and that it is far more 
superficial than is generally asserted. But, 
whatever its origin, it has its causes. So far as 
they are not to be found in the purely intellect- 
ual sphere, they must be sought in social con- 
ditions, or in the existence of certain emotional 
needs not yet provided for by the newer phil- 
osophy. To try to suppress such movements 
forcibly, if any such enterprise could be serious- 
ly proposed, would be idiotic. However strong 
our conviction of intellectual error, we must be 
content to have error as long as we have fools. 
For folly, education in the widest sense is the sole, 
though singularly imperfect, remedy ; and edu- 
cation in that sense means the stimulation of 
all kinds of intellectual energy. The other 
causes can only be removed by thorough social 
reforms, and the fuller elaboration of a satis- 
factory philosophy. Persecution, were such a 
thing really conceivable, could at most drive the 
mischief to take other forms, and would remove 
one of the most potent stimulants to the more 
satisfactory variety of regenerating activity. 
My reply to the question, Why do you not 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 63 



extirpate poisonous opinions by force ? is briefly 
the old one — Because I object to quack reme- 
dies : to remedies in this case which can at 
most secure a negative result at the cost of ar- 
resting the patient's growth. When I come to 
the strictly ethical problem, Is persecution 
wicked, and, if so, why ? I must answer rather 
more fully. All that I have said is a simple 
repetition of familiar and obvious arguments. 
Not only must Mill, whom I have criticised in 
particular points, have recognized all the alleged 
evils in a general way, but I am certain that 
others less favorable to toleration would admit 
them in any given case. If, that is, a system- 
atic attack upon any opinion, or upon general 
freedom of thought, were proposed, every one 
would admit the futility of a partial persecu- 
tion, and the impossibility of an effectual one. 
It is only the form into which the general argu- 
ment is cast, that perplexes the general theory. 
It is so plain that a special utterance may be 
stopped by a sufficient penalty ; and again, it 
seems so easy to assume that a dogma is a kind 
of entity with a particular and definable set of 
consequences adhering to it, that reasoners 
overlook the unreality which intrudes in the 
course of their generalizations. They neglect 
what according to me is an essential part of the 
case — all the secondary implications, that is, 
of an effectual persecution ; the necessity of ar- 



164 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



resting a mental phase as well as a particular 
error, and of altering the whole political and 
social organization in order to provide an 
effectual censorship. If these necessities are 
more or less recognized, they are thrust out of 
the argument by a simple device. The impos- 
sibility of organizing an effectual persecution 
now is admitted ; but then it is said that this is 
a proof of modern effeminacy — sentimentalism, 
or anarchy, or some other objectionable peculi- 
arity. This is virtually to say that, though tol- 
eration must be admitted as a transitional 
phase, it implies a weakness, not strength ; and, 
in brief, that the advocate of persecution would 
prefer a totally different social state, namely, 
such a one as combines all the requisites for an 
adequate regulation of opinion. Persecution is 
wrong, here and now, for you and me, because 
our teeth are drawn, and we can only mumble 
without biting ; but we will hope that our teeth 
may grow again. The admission, in Avhatever 
terms it may be made, is perhaps enough for 
us. Virtually it is an admission that persecu- 
tion cannot be justified unless certain conditions 
are realized which are not now realizable ; and 
this admission is not less important because 
made in terms calculated to extenuate the im- 
portance and the permanence of these con- 
ditions. From my point of view, on the other 
hand, the circumstances thus treated as remov- 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 65 



able and trifling accidents, are really of the 
very essence of the case, and it is only by taking 
them into account that we can give a satis- 
factory theory of toleration. Toleration pre- 
supposes a certain stage of development, moral 
and intellectual. In the ruder social order, tol- 
eration is out of the question for familiar rea- 
sons. The rudimentary Church and State are 
so identified that the kingly power has the 
spiritual sanctity, and the priest can wield the 
secular arm. Heresy is a kind of rebellion, and 
the gods cannot be renounced without an at- 
tack upon political authority. Intellectual ac- 
tivity is confined to a small class, and opinions 
change by an imperceptible and unconscious 
process. • Wherever such a condition is actually 
in existence, controversy can only be carried on 
by the sword. A change of faith is not caused 
by argument, but is part of the process by 
which a more powerful race conquers or extir- 
pates its neighbors. The higher belief has a 
better chance, perhaps, so far as it is character- 
istic of a superior race, but owes little to its 
logical or philosophical merits. And, in such a 
state of things, toleration is hardly to be called a 
virtue, because it is an impossibility. If the equi- 
librium between sects, as between races, depends 
upon the sword, the propagator or the defender 
of the faith must use the sword as the essential 
condition of his success, If individuals perceive 



1 66 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



that toleration is desirable, they perceive also 
that it can only be achieved through an eleva- 
tion of the whole race to a higher social condi- 
tion. It remains as an unattainable ideal, dimly 
foreshadowed in some higher minds. 

In the more advanced stage, with which we 
have to do, the state of things is altered. 
Church and State are no longer identified ; a 
society has a political apparatus discharging 
one set of functions, and an ecclesiastical appa- 
ratus (or more than one) which discharges 
another set. Some such distinction exists as a 
plain matter of fact. There remains, indeed, 
the perplexed controversy as to its ultimate 
nature, and the degree in which it can be main- 
tained. The priest is a different person from 
the ruler, and each individual is governed in 
part of his conduct by a reference to the 
political order, and in other parts by a reference 
to the spiritual order. On the other hand it is 
urged, and indeed it is undeniable, that the dis- 
tinction is not a complete separation. Every 
spiritual rule has its secular aspect, and every 
secular rule its spiritual. Each power has an 
influence over the whole of conduct, and it is 
idle to draw a line between theory and practice, 
inasmuch as all theory affects practice, and all 
practice is based upon theory. How are the 
conflicting claims of two powers to be reconciled 
when each affects the whole sphere of thought 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 67 

and conduct, without making one absolutely 
dependent upon the other? 

This opens a wide field for controversy, upon 
which I must touch only so far as the doctrine 
of toleration is concerned. How are we to 
reconcile any such doctrine with the admission 
that the State must enforce certain kinds of 
conduct, that it must decide (unless it is to be 
absolutely dependent upon the Church, or, in 
other words, unless the Church is itself a 
State) what kinds of conduct it will enforce ; 
and therefore that it may have to forbid practices 
commended by the Church, or to punish men, 
indirectly at least, for religious opinions — that 
is, to persecute? We may argue against the 
expediency in particular cases ; but how can we 
lay down a general principle ? 

Before answering, I must begin by one or two 
preliminary considerations. The existence of 
any society whatever clearly presupposes an 
agreement to obey certain elementary rules, and 
therefore the existence of a certain desire for or- 
der and respect for constituted authority. Every 
society also contains antisocial elements, and 
must impose penalties upon antisocial conduct. 
It can, of course, deal with a small part only of 
such conduct. It can punish murder, but not 
ill-will. And further, though it cannot punish 
all immorality, it may punish no conduct which 
is not immoral. The criminal law covers only 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



a part of the field of the moral law, and may 
nowhere extend beyond it. The efficacy, again, 
of all State action depends upon the existence 
of the organic instincts which have been evolved 
in its growth. Churches, like all other forms of 
association, depend upon the existence of sim- 
ilar instincts or sentiments, some of which are 
identical with those upon which the State is 
also founded, whilst others are not directly re- 
lated to any particular form of political organi- 
zation. Many different churches may arise, 
corresponding to differences of belief upon 
questions of the highest importance, of which 
the members may yet be capable of uniting for 
political purposes, and of membership of the 
same State. Agnostics, Protestants, and Cath- 
olics may agree to hang murderers and enforce 
contracts, though they go to different churches, 
and some of them to no church at all ; or hold 
the most contradictory opinions about the uni- 
verse at large. The possibility, within some 
undefined limits, is proved by experience ; but 
can we define the limits or deny the contrary 
possibility ? May not a Church be so constituted 
that membership is inconsistent with member- 
ship of the State? If a creed says " Steal," 
must not believers go to prison ? If so, and if 
the State be the sole judge on such points, do 
we not come back to persecution ? 

I reply, first, that the difficulty is in one way 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 69 

exaggerated, and in the way which greatly- 
affects the argument. Respect, for example, for 
human life or for property represents different 
manifestations of that essential instinct which 
is essential to all social development. Unless 
murderers and thieves were condemned and 
punished, there could be no society, but only a 
barbarous chaos. These are fundamental points 
which are and must be settled before the prob- 
lem "of toleration can even be raised. The 
ethical sentiment which condemns such crimes 
must exist in order that priests and policemen 
may exist. It is not a product, but a precedent 
condition, of their activity. The remark is 
needed because it is opposed to a common set 
of theories and phrases. Theologians of one 
class are given to assert that morality is the 
creation of a certain set of dogmas, which have 
somehow dropped out of the skies. The preju- 
dice against theft, for example, is due to the 
belief, itself due to revelation — that is, to a 
communication from without, — that thieves will 
have their portion in the lake of fire. So long 
as this theory, or one derived from it, holds its 
ground, we are liable to the assumption that all 
morality is dependent upon specific beliefs 
about facts, of which we may or may not be ig- 
norant, and has therefore something essentially 
arbitrary about it. It is a natural consequence 
that religion may change in such a way as to 



I JO QUES TIONS OF BELIEF. 



involve a reversal of the moral law, and there- 
fore a total incompatibility between the de- 
mands of the religion and the most essential 
conditions of social life. I hold, though I can- 
not here attempt to justify the principle, that 
this represents a complete inversion of cause 
and effect ; that morality springs simply from 
the felt need of human beings living in society ; 
that religious beliefs spring from and reflect 
the prevalent moral sentiment instead of pro- 
ducing it as an independent cause ; that a be- 
lief that murderers will be damned is the effect 
and not the cause of our objection to murder. 
There is doubtless an intimate connection be- 
tween the two beliefs. In the intellectual stage 
at which hell seems a reasonable hypothesis, we 
cannot express our objection to murder without 
speaking in terms of hell-fire. But the hell is 
created by that objection when present to minds 
at a certain stage ; and not a doctrine communi- 
cated from without and generating the objec- 
tion. From this it follows that the religious 
belief which springs from moral sentiments 
(amongst other conditions) cannot as a rule be 
in conflict with them, or with the corollaries 
deduced from them by the legislator. In other 
words, agreement between the State and the 
Church as to a very wide sphere of conduct 
must be the rule, because the sentrment upon 
which their vitality depends springs from a 



SUPPRESSION- OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 171 



common root, and depends upon general con- 
ditions independent of special beliefs and forms 
of government. In spite of these considera- 
tions, the difficulty may undoubtedly occur. A 
religion may command criminal practices, and 
even practices inconsistent with the very exist- 
ence of the society. Nihilists and communists 
may order men to steal or slay. Are they to be 
permitted to attack the State because they at- 
tack it in the name of religion ? The answer, 
of course, is plain. Criminals must be punished, 
whatever their principle. The fact that a god 
commands an action does not make it moral. 
There are very immoral gods going about 
whose followers must be punished for obeying 
their orders. Belief in his gods is no excuse 
for the criminal. It only shows that his moral 
ideas are confused. If the god has no better 
principles than a receiver of stolen goods, his 
authority gives no better justification for the 
act. The punishment does not transgress the 
principle that none but immoral acts should be 
punished, unless we regard morality as a mere 
name for actions commanded by invisible be- 
ings. Nor, leaving this for the moment, is this 
properly a case of persecution. Toleration im- 
plies, that a man is to be allowed to profess 
and maintain any principles that he pleases; 
not that he should be allowed in all cases to 
act upon his principles, especially to act upon 



1 7 2 QUES TIONS OF BELIEF. 



them to the injury of others. No limitation 
whatever need be put upon this principle in 
the case supposed. I, for one, am fully pre- 
pared to listen to any arguments for the pro- 
priety of theft or murder, or,*if it be possible, 
of immorality in the abstract. No doctrine, 
however well established, should be protected 
from discussion. The reasons have been al- 
ready assigned. If, as a matter of fact, any ap- 
preciable number of persons is so inclined to 
advocate murder on principle, I should wish 
them to state their opinions openly and fear- 
lessly, because I should think that the shortest 
way of exploding the principle and of ascertain- 
ing the true causes of such a perversion of 
moral sentiment. Such a state of things im- 
plies the existence of evils which cannot be 
really cured till their cause is known, and the 
shortest way to discover the cause is to give a 
hearing to the alleged reasons. Of course, this 
may lead to very difficult points of casuistry. 
We cannot always draw the line between theory 
and practice. An attack upon the evils of 
landed property, delivered in a certain place 
and time, may mean — shoot this particular 
landlord. In all such cases, it can only be said 
that the issue is one of fact. It is most desir- 
able that the principles upon which property in 
land can be defended should be thoroughly dis- 
cussed. It is most undesirable that any land- 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS, 173 



lord should be assassinated. Whether a par- 
ticular speech is really a part of the general 
discussion, or an act in furtherance of a mur- 
derous conspiracy, is a question to be decided 
by the evidence in the case. Sometimes it may 
be almost impossible to draw the line ; I only 
urge that it should be drawn in conformity 
with the general rule. The propriety of every 
law should be arguable ; but whilst it is the 
law, it must be enforced. 

This brings us to a further difficulty. Who, 
it is asked, is to decide these cases? The State 
is to punish acts which are inconsistent with its 
existence or immoral. But if the State is to 
decide, its decision is ultimate ; and it may de- 
cide, for example, as Cromwell decided, that the 
Mass was an immoral ceremony, and therefore 
as much to be suppressed as an act of theft. 
Simply to traverse the statement of fact would 
be insufficient. If we merely deny the immor- 
ality of the Mass, we say that Cromwell was 
mistaken in his facts, not that his conduct was 
immoral in itself. He was mistaken, as he 
would have been mistaken had he supposed 
that the congregation was collected to begin a 
political rising, when it simply came together 
for a religious ceremonial. The objection (if 
we may fairly judge Cromwell by a modern 
standard, which need not be here considered) is 
obviously different. It assumes that the sup- 



174 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



pression of the Mass was an act done in restraint 
of opinion. Nobody alleged that the Mass had 
any other ill consequences than its tendency to 
encourage the spread of a religion. A simple 
act of idolatry is not of itself injurious to my 
neighbor. I am not injured because, you being 
a fool, do an act of folly which is nothing but an 
open avowal of your folly. The intention of 
the persecutor was to restrain the spread of an 
opinion by terror ; and just so far as that was 
the intention, it was an act of intolerance. It 
is easy to put different cases. If, for example, 
a creed commanded human sacrifices it might 
be (I should say that it would be) right to sup- 
press an antisocial practice. The murder 
would not be justified because of the invisible 
accomplice, though he were called a god. The 
action should therefore be punished, though we 
ought not to punish the promulgation of an 
argument in favor of the practice, nor to punish 
other harmless practices dictated by the same 
creed. But in the case of the Mass, the con- 
duct would be admittedly harmless in every 
other respect than in its supposed effect upon 
opinion. The bare act of eating a wafer with 
certain ceremonies only became punishable be- 
cause the actor attached to it, and encouraged 
others to attach to it, a particular religious sig- 
nificance. Restraint of opinion, or of its free 
utterance, by terror is the essence of persecu- 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 17$ 



tion, and all conduct intended to achieve that 
purpose is immoral. The principle is entirely 
consistent with the admission that a legislator 
must decide for himself whether or not that is 
the real tendency of his legislation. There is 
no appeal from the Legislature, and therefore 
it must decide in the last resort. But it does 
not follow that a court from which there is no 
appeal, follows no rules in fact, nor that all its 
decisions are morally right. In laying down 
such a principle, or any other first principle, 
we are not proposing a rule which can be en- 
forced by any external authority. It belongs 
to a sphere which is antecedent to all legisla- 
tion. We say simply that a legislator will ac- 
cept it so far as he legislates upon sound prin- 
ciples. * Nor is it asserted that the principle is 
always free from ambiguity in its applications. 
Granting that persecution is wrong, it may still 
be a fair question whether this or that law implies 
persecution. There may be irreconcilable differ- 
ences of opinion. The legislator may declare 
that a particular kind of conduct is immoral, or, 
in other words, that the practice is irreconcilable 
with the essential conditions of social welfare. 
The priest may assert that it is commanded by 
his deity, and moreover that it is really moral 
in the same sense in which the legislator de- 
clares it to be immoral. Who is to decide ? 
The principle of toleration does not of itself 



I7 6 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



answer that question. It only lays down cer- 
tain conditions for conducting the argument. 
It decides that the immorality must consist in 
something else than the evil tendency of any 
general doctrine. A man must not be punished 
for openly avowing any principles whatever. 
Any defence of the proposed rule is irrelevant 
unless it contains an allegation that the punish- 
ment is inflicted for something else than a de- 
fence of opinion. And further, if agreement be 
still impossible, the principle does not say who 
is to give the decision ; it only lays down a 
condition as to the mode of obtaining the de- 
cision. In the last resort, we may say, the 
question must be fought out, but it must be 
fought out with fair weapons. The statesman, 
so long as he is seriously convinced, must up- 
hold the law, but he must allow its policy and 
justice to be freely discussed. No statement 
can be made as to the result. The statesman 
appeals directly to one class of motives ; the 
priest to others not identical, though not dis- 
parate. The ultimate success of one or the 
other, will depend upon the constitution of the 
society, and the strength of all the various 
forces by which authority is supported and bal- 
anced. Toleration only insures fair-play, and 
implies the existence of conditions necessary 
for securing a possibility of ultimate agreement. 
The relevant issues are defined, though the 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 77 



question of fact remains for discussion. 
Even where brute force has the most unre- 
stricted play, and rule is most decidedly based 
upon sheer terror, all power ultimately rests 
upon the beliefs and sentiments of the society. 
The advantage of toleration is to exclude that 
kind of coercion which tries to restrain opinion 
by sheer terror, and therefore by considera- 
tions plainly irrelevant to the truth of the 
opinions. 

This leads to what are really the most difficult 
problems at the present day. No moral prin- 
ciple, I should say, and certainly not the prin- 
ciple of toleration, can lay down a distinct ex- 
ternal criterion of right and wrong applicable 
at once to all concrete cases. No test, by the 
nature of the case, can be given which will de- 
cide at once whether a particular rule does or 
does not transgress the principle of toleration. 
This is especially true in the questions where the 
question of toleration is mixed up with the other 
question as to the proper limits of State inter- 
ference. A great deal has been said, and very 
little has been decided, as to the latter problem. 
We may argue the propriety of the State un- 
dertaking the management of railways or inter- 
fering between laborers and capitalists, without 
considering the principle of toleration in the 
sense in which I have taken it. But w T hen we 
come to such controversies as that about the 



178 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



Established Church or the national systems of 
education, the problem becomes more intricate. 
The briefest glance must suffice to show the 
bearing of my principles upon such problems. 
An Established Church was clearly open to ob- 
jection on the ground of intolerance, so long as 
it was virtually and avowedly an organization 
for propagating a faith. When it was supported 
on the ground that its doctrines were true, and 
dissent was regarded as criminal because hereti- 
cal, persecution was accepted in principle and 
carried into practice. At the present day its 
advocates have abandoned this ground. All 
that can be said is that the State confers certain 
privileges upon, and assign certain revenues to, 
persons who will discharge certain functions and 
accept certain tests. Dissenters, therefore, are 
excluded from the privileges on account of 
their faith. But it may be urged that the 
functions discharged by the Church are useful 
to the people in general, even to unbelievers, 
and that in the opinion of unbelievers them- 
selves. And, again, it is argued that the formu- 
laries of the Church are maintained not as true, 
but simply as expressing the opinions of the 
majority. There is no direct persecution, for 
any one may dissent as much as he pleases, and 
(unless he is Mr. Foote) attack any doctrines 
whatever. The existence of such an institution 
must of course act to some extent as a bribe, if 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. I 79 



not as a threat ; but implies so little of direct 
intolerance that it is frequently defended ex- 
pressly and sincerely on the ground that it is 
favorable to freedom of thought. To argue all 
the issues here suggested would require a trea- 
tise. I should certainly hold that so long as an 
Establishment exists, the free play of opinion is 
trammelled, in spite of some plausible arguments 
to the contrary. But I certainly hold also that 
it is impossible to condemn an Establishment 
purely and simply on the ground of toleration, 
without doing violence to fair argument. All 
that can be said is that questions of toleration 
are here involved, along with many other ques- 
tions possibly of more importance in this partic- 
ular case, and I am not prepared to cut the 
knot by any unqualifed assertion. And this is 
equally true of national education. It does not 
necessarily imply any intolerance whatever. 
Not only may it be possible or easy in many 
cases to solve the problem by giving an educa- 
tion which all sects approve, and to leave the 
religious education to each sect ; but there is an- 
other consideration. Toleration implies that 
each man must have a right to say what he 
pleases. It does not imply a right both to im- 
press his own doctrines upon other people and 
to exclude the influence of other teachers. If I 
take the child of a Protestant and bring him up 
as a Catholic, or vice versa, I am guilty un- 



1 80 QUES TIONS OF BELIEF. 



doubtedly of a gross act of tyranny. But I 
am not necessarily more intolerant than if I de- 
cided that a slave was to be educated by the 
State instead of by his master. The moral 
question falls under a different head. The 
Legislature in such a case is altering the rela- 
tion between parents and children. It is hand- 
ing over to others the authority over the chil- 
dren hitherto possessed by their parents. This 
is very grave and, beyond narrow limits, a most 
objectionable proceeding, but it is not ob- 
jectionable as intolerant. It is simply chang- 
ing one kind of influence for another. The 
parent's right to his own opinions and their 
utterance is not the same as his right to instil 
them into other minds ; the tyranny implied is 
the tyranny of limiting his power over his chil- 
dren ; and that limitation, upon other grounds, 
may be most oppressive. But if the child was 
sent to a school where he was allowed to hear 
all opinions, and his parents had access to him 
amongst others, he would clearly be freer to 
form his own creed, and, so far, there would be 
more room for the free play of opinion. To 
give the rule over him exclusively to his parents 
is so far to sanction private intolerance, though 
for other reasons this may be fully justifiable. 
The question of intolerance is raised at a differ- 
ent point. If, for example, one creed should 
be favored at the expense of others, if all the 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. l8l 



schools of a country should be Protestant whilst 
some of the people were Catholic, we should 
clearly have a case of limiting opinion by force ; 
and so, if any uniform creed were prescribed 
by the State, all dissenters might complain of 
persecution. It may further be urged that 
some such result is a natural result of a State 
system. I do not argue the question which I 
only notice to show how the simple doctrine of 
toleration may be mixed up with other prob- 
lems, here, for example, with the enormously 
important question of the proper limits of 
parental authority, which render impossible any 
off-hand decision. The principle of toleration 
may be simple ; the importance of so organiz- 
ing society that it may be carried out without 
exceptions is enormous , but it is not the sole 
principle of conduct, and in a complex condi- 
tion of society, full of fragments of institutions 
which have more or less deviated from their 
original functions, we must sometimes b e con- 
tent with an imperfect application, and permit 
it to be overridden by other principles which 
spring from the same root of social utility, and 
cannot be brought into harmony with it without 
changes which, for the moment, are impracti- 
cable. 

How far, then, does the principle, thus un- 
derstood, differ from the simple doctrine of 
expediency, and therefore exclude the admis- 



182 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



sion that we have in every case to decide by 
the calculation of consequences ? The final re- 
ply to this question will sum up what I have to 
say by indicating what I take to be the weak- 
ness or inadequacy of the simple utilitarian 
doctrine. I entirely agree with Mill that con- 
duct is proved to be immoral by proving it to 
be mischievous, or, in other words, productive 
of a balance of misery. But I hold that his 
neglect of the conditions of social development 
deprives his argument of the necessary coher- 
ency. For the reasons already set forth, I say 
that toleration becomes possible and desirable 
at a certain stage of progress. If this condi- 
tion be overlooked or insufficiently recognized, 
we fall into two errors. The advocate of tolera- 
tion tries to prove that persecution is bad, irre- 
spectively of this condition, and therefore that 
it was bad at the earliest as well as the latest 
stages. Since this is not true, and therefore 
cannot be proved, his argument seems to break 
down ; and so we find that the arguments from 
history are indiscriminately joined, and that 
the advocates of persecution argue as if prece- 
dents drawn from primitive social stages were 
applicable without modification to the latest. 
They frequently try to defend this explicitly 
by assuming that human nature is always the 
same, and inferring that, if people once argued 
with the fist, we must always use that contra* 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 83 



versial weapon. That human nature always 
attains certain fundamental properties may be 
fully granted ; but if this inference be sound, 
civilization, which consists in great measure in 
learning to limit the sphere of brute force, must 
be an illusory phenomenon. From my point of 
view, on the other hand, the recognition that 
society does in fact grow is an essential point of 
the case. When we have to deal with the later 
stages, Mill's argument fails of cogency just so 
far as he treats its essential characteristics as 
though they were mere accidents. So, as we 
have seen, he says, virtually, that persecution 
may be effective in suppressing an opinion ; 
and passes lightly over the consideration of the 
real meaning of this " may be." It " may be" 
efficient if it is so vigorous as to choke thought 
as well as to excise particular results of thought, 
and if therefore a political organization exists 
which becomes altogether impossible as society 
advances beyond a certain stage. But when 
we restore the condition thus imperfectly indi- 
cated to its proper place in the argument, Mill's 
arguments, cogently stated already, acquire 
fresh cogency. At that stage toleration be- 
comes an essential condition of development, 
and therefore it becomes at the same time an 
essential condition of promoting happiness. 
Given such a social organization as exists at 
present, the only kind of persecution which is 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



possible is that which is condemned by every 
one as ineffectual. To persecute without sup- 
pressing, to stimulate hypocrisy without en- 
couraging faith, is clearly to produce suffering 
without compensating advantage. Persecution 
is an anachronism and becomes a blunder, and 
upon this showing it is so palpably impolitic 
and therefore immoral that even a theoretical 
advocate of persecution admits that it is wicked 
under the conditions. The chief point of differ- 
ence is that he does not recognize the necessity 
of the conditions, or fancies that he implicitly 
gets rid of them by saying that he dislikes 
them. 

This suggests one further explanation. You 
assume, it is said, that progress is a blessing. 
We prefer the mediaeval, or the pagan, or the 
savage state of society, and deny that progress 
deserves the admiration lavished upon it by 
professors of claptrap. I make no such assump- 
tion, whatever my private opinion ; I simply 
allege the fact of progress as showing histori- 
cally what is the genesis of toleration, and 
therefore the conditions under which it has be- 
come essential. But whether progress be a 
good or a bad thing, whether men are happier 
or less happy than monkeys, the argument is 
unaffected. Perhaps a child is happier than a 
man ; but a man does not therefore become 
happier by adopting childish modes of life. 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 85 



When society is at a given stage, you cannot 
restore the previous stage, nor can you adopt 
the old methods. The modes by which society 
progresses determine a certain organization, and 
when that exists it becomes an essential part of 
the problem. It is still possible to be intoler- 
ant ; but it is not possible to restore the condi- 
tions under which intolerance could be carried 
out as a principle, and therefore you can only 
tease and hamper and irritate without gaining 
any proportional advantage, if any advantage 
whatever. Even if there be a period at which 
it is still possible to arrest progress, you do not 
insure a maintenance of the existing stage ; but 
rather insure actual decay. The choice is not 
between advancing and standing still, but be- 
tween growing and rotting ; and the bitterest 
denouncers of progress may think it less ob- 
jectionable than actual decline. We have for- 
tunately advanced beyond that period ; and 
may therefore say that, given the existing 
order, toleration is not merely conducive on the 
average, but is unconditionally and necessarily 
conducive to happiness. I do not of course 
deny that in this, as in all moral principles, 
there may not be found, here and there, excep- 
tional cases which may amuse a casuist ; but 
they can be only such rare cases as might cause 
doubt to one thoroughly convinced of the es- 
sential importance of a complete permeation of 



1 86 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



society by tolerant principles. Something, in- 
deed, remains to be done, perhaps much, before 
the principle can be thoroughly carried. There 
is a region of difficulties or anomalies not yet 
cleared up. Toleration, in fact, as I have under- 
stood it, is a necessary correlative to a respect 
for truthfulness. So far as we can lay it down 
as an absolute principle that every man should 
be thoroughly trustworthy and therefore truth- 
ful, we are bound to respect every manifesta- 
tion of truthfulness. In many cases a man's 
opinions are really determined by his character, 
and possibly by bad characteristics. He holds 
a certain creed because it flatters him as a 
cow r ardly or sensual or selfish animal. In that 
case it is hard, but it is right, to distinguish be- 
tween our disapproval of the passions, and our 
disapproval of the open avowal of the doctrines 
which spring from them. The virtue of truth- 
fulness is naturally recognized in particular 
cases before the virtue of toleration. It was 
obviously necessary to social welfare that men 
should be able to trust each other, and, there- 
fore, that in all private relations a man's word 
should be as good as his bond. The theory 
was virtually limited by the understanding that 
there were certain opinions which could not be 
uttered without endangering the social order. 
If an avowal of disbelief in the gods necessarily 
meant disloyalty, the heretic was punishable 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 87 

upon that ground, whatever might be thought 
of his virtue. The conflict began as soon as a 
respect for such sincerity was outraged by a 
punishment still held to be necessary. It is 
solved when society is organized in such a way 
that this necessity is removed; when, therefore, 
the outrage is not compensated even apparently, 
and the suppression of free utterance is seen to 
be in itself an inappropriate mode of meeting 
the difficulty. It is clinched by the spread of 
a general conviction that the only safe basis for 
any theory is the encouragement of its full dis- 
cussion from every point of view. By a strange 
inconsistency, toleration is still sometimes de- 
nounced even by acute reasoners as a product 
of absolute scepticism. It may spring from 
scepticism as to the particular doctrines en- 
forced ; but it is certainly inseparable from the 
conviction, the reverse of sceptical, that truth 
is attainable, and only attainable, by the free 
play of intelligence. Toleration, it is said, is 
opposed to " the principle of authority " ; as if 
there could be a principle of authority in the 
abstract ! To say that we are to accept au- 
thority in the abstract is to say that we are to 
believe any thing that anybody tells us : that is, 
to believe direct contradictions. It is in fact 
opposed to any authority which does not rest 
upon the only possible ground of rational au- 
thority — the gradual agreement of inquirers 



1 88 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 

free from all irrelevant bias, and therefore from 
the bias of sheer terror of the evils inflicted by- 
persons of different opinions. 

The principle, I have said, is not yet fully 
developed. Intolerance of the crudest kind is 
discredited, and has come to be regarded as 
wicked. It is admittedly wrong to burn any 
man because he does not think as I think. But 
there are the cases already noticed, in which, 
though heretical opinion is not punishable as 
such, it carries with it certain disqualifications, 
or is marked by a certain stigma in consequence 
of institutions not exclusively designed for that 
purpose. Such anomalies may be gradually re- 
moved, but they cannot be adequately discussed 
under the simple heading of tolerance. We 
are, in regard to them, in the same position as 
our ancestors in regard to the primary question 
of toleration. The concrete facts are still so 
ravelled that we have (if I may say so) to make 
a practical abstraction before we can apply the 
abstract theory. And, besides this, further 
corollaries may be suggested. It is a recog- 
nized duty not to punish people for expressing 
opinion ; but it is not a recognized duty to 
let our opinions be known. The utterance of 
our creed is taken to be a right, not a duty. 
And yet there is a great deal to be said for ob- 
jecting to passive as well as active reticence. 
If every man thought it a duty to profess his 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 89 



creed openly, he would be doing a service not 
only by helping to remove the stigma which 
clings to unpopular creeds, but very frequently 
by making the discovery that his opinions, 
when articulately uttered, were absurd, and the 
grounds upon which they are formed ludicrous- 
ly inadequate. A man often excuses himself 
for bigotry because he locks it up in his own 
breast instead of openly avowing it. Brought 
into daylight, he might see its folly and recog- 
nize the absurdity of the- principle which makes 
it a duty to be dogmatic about propositions 
which we are palpably unable to understand or 
appreciate. If, however, the right of holding 
one's tongue be still considered as sacred, 
though it seems to be justified only by the 
remnant of the bigotry directed against free 
speech, there is an application of the principle 
in the sphere of politics which requires explicit 
notice. The doctrine of toleration requires a 
positive as w r ell as a negative statement. It is 
not only wrong to burn a man on account of 
his creed, but it is right to encourage the open 
avowal and defence of every opinion sincerely 
maintained. Every man who says frankly and 
fully what he thinks is so far doing a public 
service. We should be grateful to him for at- 
tacking most unsparingly our most cherished 
opinions. I do not say that we should be 
grateful to him for attacking them by unfair 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



means. Proselytism of all varieties is to my 
mind a detestable phenomenon ; for proselytism 
means, as I understand it, the attempt to influ- 
ence opinion in an underhand way, by appeals 
to the passions which obscure reason or by 
mere personal authority. The only way in 
which one human being can properly attempt 
to influence another is the encouraging him to 
think for himself instead of endeavoring to in- 
stil ready-made doctrines into his mind. Every 
sane person of course should respect the au- 
thority of more competent inquirers than him- 
self, and not less in philosophical or religious 
than in scientific questions. But he should 
learn to respect because the authority is compe- 
tent, not because it is that of some one whom 
he respects for reasons which have nothing to 
do with such competence. 

The ultimate ground for any belief should be 
understood to be the fact that it can stand the 
freest posssible discussion from every possible 
point of view. And, for this reason, I confess 
that I am quite unable to accept the excuses put 
forward in the case of the recent sentences for 
blasphemous libel. So far as the offenders 
were brutal or indecent in their language, or 
obtruded insults upon " unwilling ears and eyes/' 
I of course admit that they were acting wrongly ? 
and may have been obnoxious to the strongest 
possible language of moral reprobation. But 



SUPPRESSION OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 191 

it seems impossible to reconcile the infliction of 
a severe punishment with the theory that the 
manner alone was punishable and the matter 
perfectly justifiable. If I sincerely hold that a 
man is right in expressing his opinions and at- 
tacking my own so long as he does it decently ; 
and further that he is not only exercising a 
right but discharging a duty in attacking what 
he holds to be a mischievous error, I jind it 
very hard to say that he ought to be punished 
merely for the manner. Of course, an insult to 
any creed uttered in such a time and place as to 
provoke a breach of the peace should be re- 
strained like any other provocation of the kind ; 
and the measure of the appropriate punishment 
depends upon the tendency to produce the 
specific result. But, in this case, it is clear that 
the evil is simply the injury to the feelings of 
believers. Now, it is in the first place clear 
that a man may say things in all seriousness 
which hurt my feelings all the more because 
they are decently expressed. If I am seriously 
persuaded that Mahomet was a vile impostor, I 
can hardly convey my opinion to a Mahom- 
medan in an agreeable way; and yet Christians 
will admit that it may be my duty to convey 
it, in proper time and place. It is very diffi- 
cult, to say the least, to distinguish between 
the intrinsic offensiveness of certain opinions 
and the accidental aggravation in the mode of 



192 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



utterance, and difficult, therefore, to punish the 
offence without punishing the legitimate utter- 
ance. And hence, in the next place, it seems 
that the offensiveness of manner belongs to 
that kind of immorality which can best be sup- 
pressed by public opinion. A man who is 
brutal in language injures his own cause by his 
mode of advocacy, and that injury is the proper 
penalty for his offence. Brutal abuse is com- 
mon enough in political controversy, and when 
it is not a provocation to violence it is rightly 
left to its own inevitable consequences. No- 
body has done more service to Mr. Gladstone 
than some of his virulent denouncers. 

If, in short, we really and sincerely held that 
the utterance of all opinions, orthodox or the 
reverse, was not only permissible but desirable ; 
and wished to restrain only that kind of utter- 
ance which is needlessly offensive — whether 
offensive to Christians or infidels, Protestants 
or Catholics, — we should, I imagine, be forced 
to the conclusion that criminal laws should not 
be called into play to punish people for out- 
rages upon good taste, but only for directly in- 
citing to violence. The fact that an opinion is 
offensive to a majority is so far a reason for 
leaving it to public opinion, which in most cases 
is perfectly capable of taking care of itself ; and 
we are certainly not impartial or really tolerant 
till we are equally anxious to punish one of 



S UP PRE SSI ON OF POISONOUS OPINIONS. 1 93 



the majority for insulting the minority. But 
I am straying too far from the general ques- 
tion ; and only wish to point out that a hearty 
acceptance of the principle of toleration, and a 
genuine recognition of the fact that a man is 
entitled to more than mere impunity when he 
attacks an established creed, would lead to 
some practical consequences not yet recog- 
nized. 



MODERN MIRACLES. 



A REJOINDER. 
By E. S. SHUCKBURGH. 

THE advocates of the pretensions of the Ro- 
man Catholic Church are skilful in adapting 
the tone of their argumerts to the prevailing 
fashion of the day. Just now we are nothing if 
not scientific. Accordingly, Mr. Clarke, in put- 
ting his case for the Lourdes miracles, appeals 
confidently not to our faith or our imagination, 
but to our own sense of the value of evidence, 
and to our powers of weighing it and drawing 
conclusions from it. The evidence which 
" women and priests'' would give is left out of 
the question, and only trained experts who 
know what the "derma" and "epidermis" are, 
and can talk about an "anchylosis of the knee," 
are called into court. 

Mr. Clarke addresses two classes of readers in 
his paper. Catholics are informed to what ex- 
tent their credulity or faith is required ; and 
non-Catholics are confronted with such proofs 
of one particular set of miracles as in Mr. 
Clarke's eyes can only be rejected by almost in- 
credible folly or perversity. 

194 



MODERN MIRACLES. 



195 



With the directions contained in the former 
half of his treatise I have nothing to do. I 
must remark, however, as an entire outsider, 
that the case of the rational Catholic seems a 
hard one. He is not, to be sure, to be cast out 
as a heretic unless he rejects those miracles 
" which have been examined by ecclesiastical 
authority and solemnly approved by the Holy 
See." But there are many other miracles be- 
sides these which commend themselves to a 
pious Catholic; and if he rejects them, he is 
"with difficulty " acquitted of " intolerable in- 
solence." He lays himself open "to the very 
gravest suspicion of disloyalty <> The most chari- 
table view to take of his conduct would be to 
regard him as having acted with a very imper- 
fect knowledge of his duty as a Catholic, or as 
excusable propter magnam stultitiam, on ac- 
count of some extraordinary perversity or preju- 
dice amounting almost to monomania." After 
which, one does not see why Mr. Clarke should 
feel injured by the "smile of superior intelli- 
gence " from his Protestant friendo But these 
are not all the abusive epithets he applies to 
sceptical Catholics. A miracle recognized by 
episcopal authority must be accepted prima 
facie by " every sensible Christian," Those who 
assail it are "most rash, presumptuous, and 
profane." If the attack fails, the man is "most 
culpable, and a fool for his pains," He is in any 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



case, in which a large number of people believe, 
neither " a wise man nor a loyal Catholic" to 
run counter to this consensus. 

These expressions are at any rate not want- 
ing in vigor. They remind us of the racy lan- 
guage of ecclesiastical controversy of three 
centuries ago. It seems that if the ingenuous 
arts at Oxford softened Mr. Clarke's manners, 
the Society of Jesus has allowed them to grow 
fierce again. However, Mr. Clarke may be 
safely left to settle these matters with his co- 
religionists. 

I am now speaking as one of those who, to 
use his own words, " have neither the virtue to 
love nor the intelligence to appreciate the Di- 
vine beauty " of his Church. To me, and others 
like me, he only addresses the last of his argu- 
ments. This argument he then applies to the 
case of the Lourdes miracles, and insinuates 
that none can " refuse to accept evidence so 
clear, so well established, so multiplied, so vari- 
ous, so conclusive of the point at issue" with- 
out " writing himself down a fool if he declares 
the witnesses to be either dupes or impostors, 
and the facts they narrate either a lie or a 
delusion. 

Here, at any rate, is a clear and definite issue, 
expressed perhaps in somewhat peremptory and 
forcible language, but still presenting no am- 
biguity and no appeal to any authority to which 



MODERN MIRACLES. 



1 97 



a man who uses his reason at all can demur. 
The existence of a miraculous power "still 
energizing in the Church " need not come into 
the question. Mr. Clarke's opponent may grant 
it both for the sake of argument, and because 
to deny it would be at once a petitio principii, 
and a claim to prove a negative, which it would 
be rash and presumptuous to attempt. 

The question, then, between us is simply this : 
" Is there evidence for the Lourdes miracles 
such as any reasonable man should accept?" 
But even this question is a wider one than I 
care to undertake. I propose to confine myself 
rather to a smaller question. " Has Mr. Clarke 
in his paper given us sufficient evidence, or 
evidence of a sort, to convince an ordinary 
rational man ? " 

He gives us three cases out of the many 
which he professes to be able to adduce. It is, 
therefore, of these three, and these three alone, 
that I shall speak. 

I. Mile. Philippe is said to have been cured 
of paralysis, and of a ghastly wound in the 
throat, resulting from an operation or operations 
for cancerous swellings. This cure was instan- 
taneous and complete, took place while she was 
on her knees before the grotto, and has proved 
lasting. 

The evidence of this extraordinary cure is 
given in detail. It consists first in the state- 



I98 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



ment of Mile. Philippe herself, and secondly of 
a statement by a doctor — M. Vergez — of Mont; 
pellier. To this I answer from the standpoint 
of the ignorant public: (1) I have no evidence 
before me as to the character or trustworthiness 
of either Mile. Philippe or M. Vergez. I do 
not impeach either. But I only say that I find 
nothing in this statement to show that they 
are to be believed in a matter so unusuah In a 
matter that was of little consequence this 
would not perhaps occur to the mind. But 
that merely means that the case in point would 
not be worth sifting. Here, I submit, the case 
is of sufficient importance to justify the inquiry. 
(2) I submit that the evidence of M. Vergez is 
deficient in conclusiveness in an important 
point. He was not present at the miracle ; he 
only testifies to the curing of the wound (not a 
cancer) ; he does not say how long the interval 
was between the time at which he had seen the 
throat in its wounded state and the time at 
which he had examined it in its cured state. 
What he calls, therefore, " instantaneous cica- 
trization " may have taken place gradually and 
naturally ; and for any thing that appears from 
his words, he only knew of its instantaneousness 
from Mile. Philippe herself. In which case his 
evidence adds nothing to hers. He appears 
not to mention the paralysis — the cure of which, 
therefore, as far as this statement goes, rests 
wholly on Mile. Philippe's statement. 



MODERN MIRACLES, 



II. Mme. Andre was cured of paralysis, af- 
fecting an arm and leg, making one eye blind 
and one ear deaf. This woman also is cured 
instantaneously, without entering the water, 
and while engaged in prayer. 

Again, what evidence have we given us? 
First, that she is examined before the Commis- 
sion appointed to examine alleged miracles. 
In their presence and that of two physicians she 
shows that she can use the paralyzed limbs. 

On this I remark : no names are given to the 
physicians ; I am therefore unable even to make 
an inquiry about them, as I might in the case 
of M. Vergez. The time of her stay at Lourdes 
is not stated, or any ordinary means she may 
have employed for her recovery. The evidence 
of her previous state depends w T holly on a state- 
ment of her husband's, said to have been insert- 
ed in a local paper, which does not, to say the 
least of it, read like the independent composi- 
tion of a peasant. Again, one would be glad 
to know, before accepting so important a state- 
ment, who are the Commissioners appointed to 
investigate alleged miracles ? By whom are 
they appointed ? Have they interest, direct or 
indirect, in the miraculous reputation of Lour- 
des ? I must guard against being supposed in 
saying this to be casting any doubt on the in- 
tegrity of any one. I am trying to point out 
the weak points in a piece of evidence of which 



200 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



I know nothing beyond what I read in Mr. 
Clarke's paper. 

III. M. Rene de Bil is cured of a white swell- 
ing and wounds (presumably surgical wounds). 
" He bathed in the sacred spring ; the result 
was that the wounds and swelling completely 
disappeared. " 

This cure is attested by M. Leys, who attend- 
ed the patient for five years, and was convinced 
that he was incurable. He examined him on 
the 13th of August (the day before he went to 
Lourdes), and found his condition as serious as 
ever. He examined him again on the 3d of 
September, and " found that the white tumor, 
ulcers, and fistulous passage have disappeared, 
that the leg has become straight, and that the 
young man walks without the help of his 
crutches, which before were indispensable to 
him." 

This is perhaps the strongest of the three 
cases, as it presents the medical examination as 
definitely taking place immediately before and 
after the visit to Lourdes. But I cannot admit 
that even this case, as it is stated by Mr. Clarke, 
is, or ought to be, satisfactory to an ordinary 
observer. The old question arises, Who is M. 
Leys ? What reason have we to be sure that 
he had not mistaken his patient's case, and that 
the medicinal spring did not do for him what 
M. Leys declared to be impossible ? Such 



MODERN MIRACLES. 



20I 



cases of mistake are not entirely without paral- 
lel. No evidence is offered of persons who saw 
M. Rene de Bil at Lourdes ; no statement is 
made as to whether the cure was sudden or 
gradual, whether the disappearance of the ulcers 
did not account for the apparent straightening 
of the leg. 

Mr. Clarke concludes his evidence for Lourdes 
by a document contributed by Dr Constantine 
James, " a well-known Paris physician." It is 
of course my insular ignorance that makes the 
name a mer ...ane to me. But I accept the 
description. I remark, however, that his state- 
ment only amounts to this, that he has seen 
patients whom he and others thought incur- 
able return cured from Lourdes. I submit that 
the element of human fallibility is again suffi- 
cient to prevent such testimony from being 
final. Dr. James does not allege that he has 
seen cures at Lourdes, though he visited the 
place. He gives no names, and no cases which 
in themselves are incapable of cure. I submit, 
therefore, that before we receive his statement 
as final, he must tell us of definite cases, of 
which he has direct and personal observation 
near to the time, and of such a nature that they 
were absolutely incapable of cure from any 
known medical treatment, or of any that was 
procurable by the patient ; and even then a 
careful inquirer would be glad to have such 



202 



QUESTIONS OF BELIEF. 



opinions strengthened by other " well-known 
physicians." 

I have in these few sentences endeavored to 
show, not that the miracles did not take place, 
for I am not concerned to prove so much even 
if I could, but that the evidence adduced by 
Mr. Clarke is wanting in many elements of cer- 
tainty, which any man would ask for in a matter 
of first-rate importance, even though it were 
admitted that it is such as we should receive in 
ordinary and comparatively unimportant affairs. 

I must conclude with a few words on Mr. 
Clarke's general position of astonishment and 
indignation that reasonable men can be found to 
doubt the truth of facts tested and pronounced 
sound by the Sacred College, by bishops, and 
by a general consensus of believers. Let me 
put a case. Take any daily paper that admits 
the advertisements of quack medicines. There 
you will find certificates of cures almost as mi- 
raculous, of every disease nearly under the sun, 
attributed to some ointment or pill, which on 
being analyzed is found to contain, in some 
small quantity, some quite harmless and wholly 
ineffectual drug. To the virtues of this medi- 
cine you will find innumerable testimonials from 
peers and members of Parliament, from clergy- 
men and lawyers, and, more surprising still, 
from physicians, with their full names and ad- 
dresses, and many letters after their names. 



MODERN MIRACLES. 



203 



That the public believe and buy is proved by 
the enormous fortune realized by more than one 
of the patentees of these wonderful medicines. 

How do I account for this ? I cannot ac- 
count for it at all. The prevalence and vitality 
of a lie is the most astonishing and dishearten- 
ing thing in the world's history. How does 
Mn Clarke account for the millions who believe 
in the divine mission and miraculous revelations 
of Mahomet or Joe Smith ?. For the millions 
who live by the miraculous life of Buddha ? 
For the millions who reject the authority of the 
Pope ? What is called " priestcraft " in religion 
is " party spirit " in politics, and may be defined 
as that devotion to" one's own sect or party 
which blinds us to general truths, duties, or in- 
terests. This may perhaps go a little way tow- 
ard an explanation ; but I admit that it goes a 
very little way. I may indeed give up the 
problem in despair ; but one thing I do learn 
from it, and that is to care very little for num- 
bers or a consensus of believers in estimating 
the truth of a particular alleged fact or tenet. 
The old proverb " Magna est Veritas et praeval- 
ebit " should be, if we regard the history of the 
world at large, " Magnum est mendacium et 
praevaluit." Nor am I the first to feel this. 
" A wonderful and a horrible thing is commit- 
ted in the land," says Jeremiah ; " the prophets 
prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by 



204 QUESTIONS OF BELIEF, 



their means ; and my people love to have it so." 
This is the puzzling but the universal fact — 
" my people love to have it so." One feels 
tempted to cap Mr. Clarke's cardinal and his 
caro mio by a reference to that other cardinal 
and his almost as historical saying. At any 
rate, the truth remains, " Vulgus vult decipi et 
decipitur." 



END. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: March 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-2111 



RECENT PUBLICATIONS. 

Authors and Publishers s a Manual of suggestions for beginners in 
literature ; comprising description of publishing methods and arrange- 
ments, directions for the preparation of MSS. for the press, explanations 
of the details of book-manufacturing, instructions for proof-reading, 
specimens of typography, the text of the United States Copyright Law, 
and information concerning international copyrights, together with 
general hints for authors. 8vo, $1.00. 

The American Citizen's Manual. By Worthington C. Ford. 

PART I. — Governments (National, State, and Local), the Electorate, and- 
the Civil Service. " Questions of the Day," Volume IV. 8vo, cloth, 
$1.00. 

A work planned- to afford, in compact form, a comprehensive summary of the nature 
of the organization of the Government of the United States (National, State, and 
Local), and of the duties, privileges, and responsibilities of American citizens. 
PART II. — The Functions of Government, considered with special refer- 
ence to Taxation and Expenditure, the Regulation of Commerce and 
Industry, Provision for the Poor and Insane, the Management of the 
Public Lands, &c. " Questions of the Day," Volume V. 8vo, 
cloth, $i.oo. 

The Best Reading, A priced and classified Bibliography of the more 
important English and American publications. First Series, edited by 
F. B. Perkins, covering the issues prior to 1877. 8vo, cloth, $1.50* 
Second Series, edited by L. E. Jones, comprising the issues of the five 
years ending with December, 1881. 8vo, cloth, $1.00. 
4i Invaluable alike for readers, buyers, and sellers of books."— Fort Wayne Gazette. 
Hints for Home Reading. A series of Papers by Hale, Perkins, 
Beecher, Warner, Cook, Sweetser, Mabie, and others. Edited by 
Lyman Abbott. Together with Suggestions for Libraries, with first 
second, and third lists of 500, 500, and 1,000 volumes, recommended as 
the most important and desirable. Cloth, $1.00 ; boards, 75 cents. 
"Should be in the hands of every reader in the country ; ... its suggestions are in- 
valuable. "—Boston Transcript. s 

The Literary News. A monthly bulletin, with priced lists and 
descriptive notes of elegant English and American publications. Price 
per year, 25 cents. 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, 27 8s 29 W. 23d St„ New York. 
Henrietta St., Covsnt Garden, London, 



THE TRANS-ATLANTIC SERIES. 



Select English and Continental Novels, issued in authorized American 
editions, handsomely printed in square i6mo. Price per volume, 
Paper, 50 cents; Cloth, $1.00. 

I. CAPTAIN FRACASSE. By Theophile Gautier. Trans- 
lated by E. M. Beam. 

II. THE AMAZON. By Franz Dingelstedt. Translated by James 

Morgan Hart. 

III. MOTHER MOLLY. By Frances Mary Peard. Illustrated. 

IV. THE LOST CASKET. Translated from " La Main Coupee " 

of F. du Boisgobey, by S. Lee. 
V. MADEMOISELLE BISMARCK. By Henri Rochefort. 
VI. ROMANCE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 

By William H. Mallock, author of "Is Life worth Living?" 
etc. 

VII. THE VICAR'S PEOPLE. By George Manville Fenn. 
VIII. JOHN BARLOW'S WARD. By a new writer. 
IX. THE GOLDEN TRESS. By F. du Boisgobey, author of 

" The Lost Casket," etc. 
X. JOSEPH'S COAT. By David Christie Murray i With Illus- 
trations by Barnard. 
• XL ESAU RUNSWICK. By Katherine S* Macquoid, author of 
" Patty," etc. 

XII. THE DINGY HOUSE AT KENSINGTON. By a new 

writer. Illustrated. 

XIII. LADY BEAUTY; or, CHARMING TO HER LATEST 

DAY. By Allen Muir. Illustrated. 

XIV, AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR* By Annie Edwardes, 

author of " Archie LovelL" 
XV. ABBE CONST ANTINE. By Ludovic Halevy. From the 
20th French edition, by Emily H. Hazen. 
XVI. MY TRIVIAL LIFE AND MISFORTUNE. A Gossip 
with no plot in particular. By a Plain Woman. 
Part I. SPINSTERHOOD. 
XVII. MY TRIVIAL LIFE AND MISFORTUNE, etc. 

Part II. MEUM AND TUUM. 
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, 27 & 29 W. 23d St., New York. 
18 Henrietta St., Covent Garden, London. 



